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Among the many thousands of refugees who have fled the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is united by a tragic shared experience: their spouses are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting jihadists. In Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border housing over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“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 door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat violence against women.

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

Women cooking meals at the Mbera refugee camp in eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

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

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

From early 2021 to late 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-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in Mali's north in 2012.

One diplomat in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told media outlets anonymously that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to attack so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts warn about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from specific regions in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in CAR.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability driving growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced remain within their own countries, transnational migration are on the rise, straining receiving areas with “scant assistance” 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: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, 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 withdrawal of AES nations, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more security measures will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the an international research center.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel study in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

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.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, National Defense University, in 2016.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since 2011, has been praised for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they provided those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” 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 Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Investments were made in border security, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the military, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are forbidden for civilian communication 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 numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call security agencies to report people who don’t belong.”

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

In August, a Human Rights Watch report alleged law enforcement of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have improved conditions for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in 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, food and fuel are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

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

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if fighters visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found documents in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Nouakchott. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains uncertain, much like the fate of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.