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Out of the thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, one group is united by a tragic shared experience: their spouses are presumed dead or captured.

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

Her husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she said quietly 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 assist pregnant women and fight against violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice cracking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the actions of terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The violence has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, concern has been mounting inside and beyond official channels about militant factions extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

Between January 2021 and October 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 northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in Mali's north in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told journalists anonymously that there was intelligence about ISWAP units coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa 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 Lim-Pendé in CAR.

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

While 75% of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, putting pressure on receiving areas with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and collaborating on defense plans.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” a 5,000-troop standby force in March.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, National Defense University, in 2016.

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

“Over a decade back, they offered those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative 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 gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, backed by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in intelligence-gathering.

Troops from France join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call law enforcement to report people who are outsiders.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands faced with allegations of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In August, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards 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 looks the other way while wounded fighters, food and fuel are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation 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 have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the group and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

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

Their focus is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the fate of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.