🔗 Share this article

Among the many thousands of displaced persons who have fled the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one community is bound together by a grim commonality: their spouses are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is one of them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she stated softly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against gender-based violence.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she continued, her voice breaking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

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

The conflict has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the instability and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, concern has been growing inside and beyond official channels about militant factions expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in Mali's north in 2012.

An official in the city of Douala, Cameroon, told journalists without attribution that there was information about ISWAP cells moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa caution about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Recently, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel region, with violence and insecurity forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining host communities with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and collaborating on defense plans.

The trio were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in 2023 after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-troop standby force in March.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel attend a class in Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and extensive arid lands, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, several years ago.

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

“Over a decade back, they offered those extremists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals 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 eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

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 forbidden for civilian communication and authorities have also enlisted the help of local residents in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a soldier from Mali (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 promptly contact security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

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

In late summer, a human rights investigation accused law enforcement of physically abusing displaced persons and 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.

Returning Home

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: militant factions leave the country alone and Accra turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, supplies and resources are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, 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 refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

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

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We just want to go home,” she said.