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Out of the many thousands of refugees who have fled Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one community is bound together by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp 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 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 door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against gender-based violence.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice cracking 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.

Countless individuals have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the actions of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

The violence has been fuelled by a multitude of factors, including the instability and access to weapons and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, concern has been growing within and outside government circles about armed groups extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 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 Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

An official in the city of Douala, Cameroon, informed journalists without attribution that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province units coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa caution about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from specific regions in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

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

While 75% of those displaced remain within their own countries, transnational migration are on the rise, straining host communities with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the AES alliance, creating shared documents and coordinating military strategy.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

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

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, 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 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 over a decade ago, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

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

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are banned for public use and authorities have also enlisted the help of local residents in information collection.

Troops from France join a joint anti-militant operation with a Malian soldier (left) in several years ago.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call security agencies to report people who don’t belong.”

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

In late summer, a human rights investigation accused law enforcement of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Far from there, in Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: militant factions leave the country alone and Ghana's government looks the other way while wounded fighters, supplies and resources are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the conflict has not spilled over from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

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

In 2011, the US authorities 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 group and Nouakchott. The Mauritanian government continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a few miles 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 future that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.