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Out of the thousands of refugees who have fled the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is united by a grim commonality: their spouses are presumed dead or captured.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting jihadists. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We came here because of conflict, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of a women's support group, a group of women who do community outreach in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice breaking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Countless individuals have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with often weak central governments.

The conflict has been fuelled by a multitude of factors, including the turmoil and access to weapons and foreign fighters that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, concern has been mounting within and outside official channels about armed groups expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in Mali's north in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province cells 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 diplomat said.

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa caution about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area 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, transnational migration are on the rise, straining receiving areas with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on defense plans.

The trio were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the an international research center.

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

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, in 2016.

But the nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the European Union, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are banned for public use and authorities have also recruited assistance from local residents in intelligence-gathering.

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

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the identical security measures for repression.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report accused law enforcement of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, food and fuel are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

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

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if fighters visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the current situation of the violence.

Their focus is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the fate of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.