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

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

Her husband was a police officer who ended up confronting jihadists. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We came here because of conflict, 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 help expectant mothers and fight against gender-based violence.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she continued, her voice breaking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last twenty years 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 extremist organizations and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

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

In recent years, alarm has been mounting inside and beyond government circles about militant factions expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were attributed to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed media outlets without attribution that there was information about ISWAP cells moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts warn about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity forcing growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced stay inside their nations, transnational migration are on the rise, straining receiving areas with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, 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 splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, 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 addressing the issue,” said an analyst, 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 the town of 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 conservative Islamic country with significant disparities 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 extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

But the nation, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they provided those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, 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 migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share live information with the army, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are forbidden for civilian communication and authorities have also enlisted the help of villagers in intelligence-gathering.

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

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call law enforcement to report people who are outsiders.”

Aside from successes, the country also stands faced with allegations of using the identical security measures for repression.

In August, a human rights investigation accused security officials 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 rejected the claims, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, food and fuel are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason 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 fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles 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 attention is on a future that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.