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Out of the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is bound together by a grim commonality: their spouses are missing or held captive.

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

Her husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border housing over 120 thousand 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 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 chased one another barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the actions of terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

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

In the past few years, concern has been growing inside and beyond official channels about armed groups expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM attacked 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.

An official in the city of Douala, Cameroon, told journalists without attribution that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to strike so many military formations,” the official said.

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa warn about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from specific regions in the nation of 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 violence and insecurity forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted stay inside their nations, transnational migration are on the rise, putting pressure on receiving areas with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and collaborating on military strategy.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved 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 security measures will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the an international research center.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region study in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation 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 generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since 2011, has been praised for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they provided those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, 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 wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Funding 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 patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also recruited assistance from local residents in intelligence-gathering.

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

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call security agencies to report people who don’t belong.”

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

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

The Homecoming

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

In 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 have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if fighters visit the country to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their focus is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the destiny of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We just want to go home,” she said.