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Out of the thousands of refugees who have fled the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one community is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, 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 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 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 arrived with nothing.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera refugee camp in eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

The conflict has been fuelled by a multitude of factors, including the instability and access to weapons and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, concern has been mounting inside and beyond government circles about armed groups extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in Mali's north in over a decade ago.

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told journalists anonymously that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

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

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa caution about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from specific regions in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the UN said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those uprooted remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, straining receiving areas with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

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, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in 2023 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 security measures will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region attend a class in the town of Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

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

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, unlike Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Funding were made in border security, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share live information with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are banned for public use and authorities have also recruited assistance from local residents in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a soldier from Mali (left) in several years ago.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact security agencies to report people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands faced with allegations of using the identical security measures for repression.

In late summer, a human rights investigation alleged law enforcement of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, 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 turns a blind eye while injured militants, food and fuel are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

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

In over ten years ago, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the group and Nouakchott. The Mauritanian government continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a few miles from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

Their focus is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.