Sahel Region Extremist Groups Extend Influence: Will Divided Nations Push Back?

Among the thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, one group is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their spouses are missing or held captive.

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

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

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly 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 combat violence against women.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she continued, her voice breaking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Millions of lives have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which stretches across a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with often weak state authorities.

The violence has been fuelled by a multitude of factors, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and foreign fighters that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been growing inside and beyond official channels about militant factions expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

One diplomat in Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets without attribution that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts warn about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced stay inside their nations, transnational migration are increasing, 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: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and coordinating defense plans.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its anti-militant actions.

“Over a decade back, they provided those extremists 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 German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported 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 army, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and authorities have also enlisted the help of local residents in information collection.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and numerous are interconnected families,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call law enforcement to notify about people who don’t belong.”

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

In late summer, a human rights investigation accused security officials of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring 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 nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit the country to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found documents 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 national authorities 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, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the violent past or the current situation of the violence.

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

“We simply wish to return,” she said.