🔗 Share this article

Among the many thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, one community is united by a grim commonality: their spouses are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a gendarme 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 rebuild her life with no idea 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 Femme Resource, a group of women who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice cracking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera settlement in south-eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the actions of terror groups and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The violence has been driven by a range of reasons, including the instability and availability of ammunition and foreign fighters that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, concern has been growing within and outside government circles about militant factions expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were attributed to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin assaulted a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed media outlets anonymously that there was intelligence about ISWAP units moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“They [jihadists] have developed attack capacities to strike so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s central region, while central African analysts warn about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from specific regions in Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in CAR.

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

While 75% of those displaced stay inside their nations, transnational migration are on the rise, straining receiving areas with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the AES alliance, creating shared documents and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in 2023 after the withdrawal of AES nations, 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 consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

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 significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for radical elements.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, National Defense University, several years ago.

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

“More than 10 years ago, they provided those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty 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 neighboring Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Investments were made in border security, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

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

Troops from France 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 numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call law enforcement to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for repression.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged security officials of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

Returning Home

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

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason why the violence has not spread from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

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

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the group and Nouakchott. The Mauritanian government continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack 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 uncertain, much like the fate of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We just want to go home,” she said.