🔗 Share this article

Out of the many thousands of refugees who have fled the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one community is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their spouses 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 Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border housing over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while meeting with her fellow members of a women's support group, a group of women who do community outreach in the camp to assist pregnant women 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 refugee camp in eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the actions of terror groups and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with often weak central governments.

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 the past few years, alarm has been mounting within and outside official channels about militant factions expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

An official in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed media outlets anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“They [jihadists] have built operational capabilities to attack so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa warn about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the UN said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability forcing growing populations from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, straining host communities with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and collaborating on defense plans.

The three countries were previously part 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-troop standby force in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more defensive actions will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in Sahel region attend a class in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since 2011, 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 amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

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

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also recruited assistance from villagers in intelligence-gathering.

Troops from France join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a soldier from Mali (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. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact security agencies to report people who are outsiders.”

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

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged security officials of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: armed groups leave the country alone and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while injured militants, supplies and resources are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a similar accord, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Nouakchott. 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, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

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

“We just want to go home,” she said.