🔗 Share this article

Out of the many thousands of refugees who have fled the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is bound together by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

One woman, who we'll call Amina is among them.

Her husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We came here because of conflict, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat violence against women.

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

Women cooking meals at the Mbera refugee camp in eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which stretches across a band of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

The conflict has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and foreign fighters that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, concern has been growing within and outside government circles 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 linked to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM attacked a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in northern Mali in 2012.

An official in the city of Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets anonymously that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to attack so many army positions,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts caution about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from specific regions in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Recently, the United Nations 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 uprooted remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, straining receiving areas with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and coordinating military strategy.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 alliance, 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 addressing the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in the Sahel study in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts 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 applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they offered those extremists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, regional program head of the regional Sahel programme at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“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 guarantees collaboration, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, backed by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, which was keen to stem the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share live information with the army, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and authorities have also recruited assistance from local residents in information collection.

French soldiers join a joint anti-militant operation 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. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call law enforcement to report people who don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In August, a Human Rights Watch report alleged law enforcement of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last several 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 the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: armed groups leave the country alone and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while injured militants, food and fuel are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

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

“Accounts suggest of an informal pact [that] if militants 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 US authorities claimed to have found documents in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

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

“We simply wish to return,” she said.