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Out of the many thousands of refugees who have fled Mali since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one community is bound together 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 gendarme who wound up fighting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“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 women's organization who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against violence against women.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she continued, 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 two decades across the Sahel region – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the actions of terror groups and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

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

In the past few years, alarm has been growing within and outside official channels about militant factions expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

One diplomat in the city of Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets without attribution that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“They [jihadists] have built operational capabilities to strike so many army positions,” the official said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells 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 “deadly triangle”: the zone from specific regions in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in CAR.

Recently, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, straining receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead 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 the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more effective and truly 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 attend a class in the town of Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

The nation of Mauritania, another former member 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 and Sahara region generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts 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 2011, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority 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, backed by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, 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 desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and authorities have also enlisted the help of local residents in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact law enforcement to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, the country also stands accused of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In August, a human rights investigation alleged law enforcement of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: armed groups leave the country alone and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a similar accord, 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 return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a short distance 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 tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the destiny of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We just want to go home,” she said.