Sahel Region Extremist Groups Expand Their Reach: Can a Fractured Region Respond Effectively?

Among the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a police officer who wound up fighting jihadists. In Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering 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, 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 combat violence against women.

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

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

The conflict has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the instability and access to weapons and foreign fighters that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In the past few years, concern has been growing inside and beyond government circles 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 attributed to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin assaulted a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

One diplomat in Douala, Cameroon, informed journalists without attribution that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups 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 growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity driving growing populations from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, straining host communities with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures 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.

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

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

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

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported 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 desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and officials 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 Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for repression.

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

The Homecoming

Far from there, in Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason why the violence has not spread from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and don’t carry out attacks until they go back 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 Bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the group and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles from the most recent recorded militant strike 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 uncertain, much like the fate of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.