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Out of the thousands of displaced persons who have fled Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is one of them.

Her husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a refugee settlement 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 meeting with her fellow members of a women's support group, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat violence against women.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she added, her voice cracking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera refugee camp in eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with often weak central governments.

The violence has been driven by a range of reasons, including the instability and access to weapons and foreign fighters that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

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

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists without attribution that there was intelligence about ISWAP units coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“They [jihadists] have built operational capabilities to strike so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s central region, while central African analysts caution about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from specific regions in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are on the rise, putting pressure on host communities with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and collaborating on defense plans.

The trio were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in 2023 after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in March.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in Sahel region study in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

The nation of Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the nation, which has had no extremist assault 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 surrender some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in several years ago.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and numerous are interconnected families,” said the analyst. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands faced with allegations of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a human rights investigation accused law enforcement of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

Far from there, in Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: armed groups leave the country alone and Ghana's government looks the other way while injured militants, food and fuel are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

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

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a few miles from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

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

“We simply wish to return,” she said.