Sahel Region Jihadist Groups Extend Their Reach: Will Divided Nations Respond Effectively?

Out of the many thousands of displaced persons who have fled Mali since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, one group 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 ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life 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 group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against violence against women.

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

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with often weak central governments.

The violence has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In the past few years, concern has been growing within and outside government circles about armed groups expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

An official in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told media outlets without attribution that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“They [jihadists] have built operational capabilities to strike so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa warn about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from specific regions in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region 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 driving increasing numbers from their homes.

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

An Effective Strategy?

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

The trio were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more security measures will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the an international research center.

The nation of Mauritania, another former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded 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 an analyst, regional program head of the regional Sahel programme at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where state authority is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the European Union, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the military, which launched a desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also recruited assistance from villagers in intelligence-gathering.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact law enforcement to report people who don’t belong.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, the country also stands accused of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In August, a human rights investigation alleged law enforcement of violently mistreating displaced persons and 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

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as another reason why the violence has not spilled over from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers 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 return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found documents in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the violent past 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 simply wish to return,” she said.