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Out of the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one community is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their husbands 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 refugee settlement across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We came here because of conflict, leaving everything behind,” she said quietly 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 combat gender-based violence.

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

Women cooking meals at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which stretches across a band of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The conflict has been driven 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 the past few years, concern has been mounting inside and beyond 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 extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM assaulted a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

An official in Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about new cells popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from specific regions in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced remain within their own countries, transnational migration are on the rise, putting pressure on host communities with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more security measures will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel attend a class in Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

The nation of Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for radical elements.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since 2011, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, 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, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in intelligence-gathering.

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

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In August, a Human Rights Watch report alleged security officials of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Accra turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, food and fuel are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

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

“Accounts suggest of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit the country to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

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

“We just want to go home,” she said.