Sahel-Based Extremist Forces Extend Their Reach: Can a Fractured Region Push Back?

Among the many thousands of displaced persons who have fled the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one community is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who ended up confronting extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice breaking while children chased one another barefoot in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Countless individuals have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which stretches across a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with often weak central governments.

The violence has been fuelled by a multitude of factors, including the instability and availability of ammunition and foreign fighters that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been mounting within and outside official channels about militant factions extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

One diplomat in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed media outlets without attribution that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, 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 the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Earlier this month, the UN said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel region, with violence and insecurity forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the AES alliance, creating shared documents and collaborating on military strategy.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions will need to adopt a more effective and truly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

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

“Over a decade back, they provided those extremists who want to surrender some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

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

Funding were made in border security, backed by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was keen to stem the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share real-time intelligence with the army, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are banned for public use and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in intelligence-gathering.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Aside from successes, the country also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In August, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: militant factions 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 conflict has not spread from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the group and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a few miles from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the current situation of the violence.

Their focus is on a future that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.