🔗 Share this article

Among the many thousands of refugees who have fled Mali since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, 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 police officer who wound up fighting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering more than 120,000 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 said quietly while sitting among her fellow members of a women's support group, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against gender-based violence.

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

Women preparing food at the Mbera settlement in south-eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with often weak central governments.

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

In the past few years, concern has been growing within and outside official channels about militant factions extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

One diplomat in Douala, Cameroon, told journalists anonymously that there was information about ISWAP cells moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to strike so many army positions,” the diplomat said.

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about new cells popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Recently, the United Nations said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity driving growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those uprooted stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are increasing, putting pressure on receiving areas with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year 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 adopt a more effective and truly 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.

Students escaping extremist violence 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 former member of the G5 group, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 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-Saharan area produces as many extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

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

“Over a decade back, they provided those extremists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, regional program head 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 simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the inflow of migrants.

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

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

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

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

In August, a Human Rights Watch report accused security officials of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while wounded fighters, supplies and resources are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the conflict has not spilled over from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“There are reports 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 go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government 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, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their focus is on a future that remains unpredictable, much like the destiny of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.