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Out of the many thousands of displaced persons who have fled the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

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

Her husband was a police officer who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against gender-based violence.

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

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

Millions of lives have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which stretches across a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

The conflict has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and foreign fighters that stemmed from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been mounting within and outside government circles about militant factions expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 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-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM assaulted a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in Mali's north in 2012.

One diplomat in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists anonymously that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to strike so many army positions,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts warn about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from specific regions in Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

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

While three-quarters of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the AES alliance, issuing passports and coordinating defense plans.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions will need to adopt a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 group, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the nation, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since 2011, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they provided those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in border security, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are banned for public use and authorities have also enlisted the help of local residents in intelligence-gathering.

Troops from France join a joint anti-militant operation with a Malian soldier (left) in several years ago.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact security agencies to report people who are outsiders.”

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

In August, a Human Rights Watch report accused security officials of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: armed groups leave the country alone and Accra turns a blind eye while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the conflict has not spread from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“Accounts suggest of an informal pact [that] if militants visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said the analyst.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed mentioning 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 most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their focus is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We just want to go home,” she said.