Sahel Region Jihadist Forces Extend Influence: Can a Fractured Region Respond Effectively?

Among the many thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is united by a grim commonality: their spouses are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, 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 dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly 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 fight against gender-based violence.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice breaking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which stretches across 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 frequently fragile state authorities.

The conflict has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the instability and access to weapons and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, concern has been growing inside and beyond government circles about militant factions 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 Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

One diplomat in the city of Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets anonymously that there was information about ISWAP cells moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between various armed groups 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 CAR.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are increasing, putting pressure on receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and coordinating military strategy.

The trio were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the nation, 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 offered those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, 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 government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are banned for public use and authorities have also recruited assistance from local residents in intelligence-gathering.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call security agencies to report people who don’t belong.”

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 subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have improved conditions for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while wounded fighters, food and fuel are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as another reason why the conflict has not spilled over from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“Accounts suggest of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities claimed to have found documents in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the group and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains uncertain, much like the fate of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.