🔗 Share this article

Among the thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is united by a tragic shared experience: their spouses are presumed dead or captured.

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

Her husband was a police officer who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We came here because of conflict, leaving everything behind,” she stated softly 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 gender-based violence.

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

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

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with often weak central governments.

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

In the past few years, alarm has been growing inside and beyond 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 multiple West African nations. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

An official in Douala, Cameroon, told media outlets without attribution that there was information about ISWAP cells coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to attack so many military formations,” the official said.

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa warn about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from specific regions in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in CAR.

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

While three-quarters of those displaced remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are increasing, straining host communities with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on defense plans.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in last year 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 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 International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

The nation of Mauritania, another former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts 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 applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they offered those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the European Union, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet 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 enlisted the help of villagers in information collection.

Troops from France join a joint anti-militant operation 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 Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call law enforcement to report people who don’t belong.”

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

In August, a Human Rights Watch report alleged law enforcement of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: armed groups leave the country alone and Ghana's government looks the other way while wounded fighters, food and fuel are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been widespread for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason why the violence has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Nouakchott. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles 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 tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.