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Out of the many thousands of displaced persons who have fled the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one community is united by a grim commonality: their spouses are missing or held captive.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border housing over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We came here because of conflict, leaving everything behind,” 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 combat gender-based violence.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she added, her voice breaking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera settlement in south-eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which stretches across 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 multiplied in countries with often weak central governments.

The conflict has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the turmoil and access to weapons and foreign fighters 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 coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked 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 soldiers dead.

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

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed media outlets without attribution that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“They [jihadists] have developed attack capacities to attack so many military formations,” the official said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells emerging in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa warn about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from specific regions in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

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

While three-quarters of those uprooted stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining receiving areas with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

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 trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in 2023 after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in Sahel region attend a class in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in several years ago.

The nation of Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since 2011, has been applauded for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is restricted 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, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share live information with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and authorities have also enlisted the help of local residents in information collection.

Troops from France 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. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call law enforcement to report people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, the country also stands faced with allegations of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report accused law enforcement of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Accra turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, food and fuel are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason why the conflict has not spread from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the violent past or the current situation of the violence.

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

“We just want to go home,” she said.