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Among the many thousands of displaced persons who have fled Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one community is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a police officer who ended up confronting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” 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 fight against violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice breaking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Countless individuals have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The violence has been driven by a range of reasons, including the turmoil and access to weapons and foreign fighters that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been mounting within and outside official channels about armed groups expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

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 early this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in northern Mali in 2012.

An official in Douala, Cameroon, told journalists anonymously that there was information about ISWAP cells coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to strike so many army positions,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Recently, the UN said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, putting pressure on host communities with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on defense plans.

The three countries 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 “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 efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

The nation of Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and extensive arid lands, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many jihadist ideologues 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, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the nation, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

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

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is restricted 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, backed by a multi-million euro agreement 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 military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also recruited assistance from villagers in intelligence-gathering.

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

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call law enforcement to report people who are outsiders.”

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 rape and electric shocks. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as another reason why the violence has not spilled over 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 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 facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the group and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

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

“We just want to go home,” she said.