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Out of the thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one group is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while sitting among her fellow members of a women's support group, a group of women who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice cracking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Countless individuals have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

The conflict has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the instability and access to weapons and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, concern has been mounting within and outside government circles 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 linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in Douala, Cameroon, told journalists without attribution that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

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

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts warn about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

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

While three-quarters of those uprooted stay inside their nations, transnational migration are increasing, putting pressure on host communities with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on defense plans.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more security measures will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel study in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the 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-Saharan area generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

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

“More than 10 years ago, they provided those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Funding 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 real-time intelligence with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also recruited assistance from villagers in information collection.

Troops from France join a joint anti-militant operation with a soldier from Mali (left) in 2016.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact law enforcement to report people who don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged law enforcement of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way 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 spilled over from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

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

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Osama 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 most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their attention is on a future that remains unpredictable, much like the destiny of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.