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Out of the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one group is united 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 Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, 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 assist pregnant women and combat violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice cracking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Millions of lives have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The violence has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the instability and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been growing inside and beyond official channels about armed groups extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to strike so many army positions,” the official said.

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Recently, the UN said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel region, with violence and insecurity forcing growing populations from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, straining receiving areas with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and collaborating on defense plans.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“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 an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in the Sahel study in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in several years ago.

The nation of Mauritania, another former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

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

“Over a decade back, they provided those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” 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 supply, unlike Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the army, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are banned for public use and authorities have also recruited assistance from villagers in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a joint anti-militant operation with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact security agencies to notify about people who don’t belong.”

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

In August, a Human Rights Watch report accused law enforcement of physically abusing refugees and other 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.

The Homecoming

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: militant factions leave the country alone and Ghana's government looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from adjacent 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 violence has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they go back 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 Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a few miles 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 simply wish to return,” she said.