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Out of the many thousands of refugees who have escaped the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, one group is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

One woman, who we'll call Amina is one of them.

Her husband was a police officer who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against violence against women.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she added, her voice breaking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with often weak central governments.

The violence has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the turmoil and access to weapons and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In the past few years, concern has been mounting within and outside official channels about armed groups extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin assaulted a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in northern Mali in 2012.

An official in the city of Douala, Cameroon, told journalists anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to strike so many military formations,” the official said.

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about new cells popping up in the country’s central region, while central African analysts warn about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from specific regions in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity driving growing populations from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced remain within their own countries, transnational migration are on the rise, straining receiving areas with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-troop standby force in March.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in Sahel region attend a class in the town of Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

The nation of Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been praised for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the European Union, which was eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the military, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also recruited assistance from local residents in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a joint anti-militant operation with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact security agencies to report people who don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the identical security measures for repression.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report accused law enforcement of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

Far from there, in Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: militant factions leave the country alone and Accra looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as another reason why the conflict has not spread from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found documents in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a few miles from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains uncertain, much like the fate of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.