Counterinsurgency approaches have splintered in west Africa at the same time as terror threats have shifted southward
A
mong the thousands of refugees who have fled Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is bound together by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.
Amina (not her real name) is one of them.
The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting jihadists. In Mbera, 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.
