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Among the many thousands of displaced persons who have fled Mali since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is united by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

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

Her husband was a police officer who ended up confronting jihadists. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing 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 door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice breaking while children chased one another 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 disrupted in the last two decades 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 violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with often weak state authorities.

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

In the past few years, alarm has been growing inside and beyond government circles about militant factions expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

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

“They [jihadists] have developed attack capacities to strike so many army positions,” the official said.

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa caution about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from specific regions in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the UN said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability driving growing populations from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining host communities with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the AES alliance, creating shared documents and coordinating defense plans.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in Sahel region attend a class in Dori, Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation 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-Saharan area produces as many extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

But the nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since over a decade ago, has been praised for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“More than 10 years ago, they provided those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” 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 Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in border security, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the inflow of migrants.

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share live information with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also enlisted the help of local residents in intelligence-gathering.

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

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

Aside from successes, the country also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for repression.

In late summer, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government looks the other way while injured militants, food and fuel are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

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

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

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At Mbera, 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 tomorrow that remains uncertain, much like the fate of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.