The name of the camel was Zajarek. I was told he was moody, but he and I got along fine. By the second day of the mission, the men of the Groupement Nomade de la Garde Nationale let me loose to ride him without a chaperone, and after some initial difficulty I learned to keep him in a jogging gait, which the unit maintained for hours, bouncing lightly on wooden saddles, smoking loose tobacco out of short pipes, tying and retying their black service turbans, and posing with their rifles whenever I went to take a picture.

I rode for a long time with a méhariste named M’Bérik, a jocular, martial man in his fifties. He knew a great deal about the desert and the work of herding animals. We had a moment of confusion when I asked whether he sensed that the climate of the Sahel was ‘hotter now’.

‘The Sahel is very hot now,’ he said. ‘Drones, terrorists, war in every direction,’ he said. ‘Oooh it is too hot!’

His uncle had been killed the month before in a drone strike after he crossed with his herds into Mali, looking for forage that had grown increasingly scarce in recent decades. ‘Look from Sudan, Libya, Mali, Niger, it is hot hot hot.’ 

We left the vicinity of Néma, Mauritania, and rode south through dunes and acacias toward the border with Mali. It was long into the winter dry season, and we moved between isolated watering points, where nomads came with their herds of camels, goats, and sheep. The war that raged on the other side of the border had begun in Mauritania, before spreading south and coming to color every part of life in the region known as the Sahel – a name that, in common parlance, denotes a cluster of former French colonies in the northern interior of Africa: Mauritania and Chad at the edges, and Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in what is often referred to as the ‘central Sahel’. In a decade of fighting focused in this central Sahel, transnational Islamist groups built shadow systems of power – drawing recruits and funds by controlling gold mines and villages inhabited above all by the cattle-herding Peul people, fighting by ambush and dispersing when confronted by government or international troops. In January this year, the UN Secretary General António Guterres gave a speech warning that the region had become the world’s ‘epicenter of terrorism’, and that it was facing an ‘an all-out assault on civilization itself’.

The war was fought mostly between central authorities and the sons of nomads. But few people in Mauritania are more than a generation or two away from having been nomads themselves. The méharistes – the camel cavalry – carried small arms and barely enough ammunition for a firefight. But they have developed their own way of fighting the insurgency that has outlasted four international deployments and the military power of half a dozen African governments. It is a soft-touch approach, and goes some way in explaining the mystery of how Mauritania, nearly alone in the region, has managed to achieve a tenuous peace. They cultivate spies. They control the watering points and watch who uses the passes in the high country. They move on the ground, and speak with the women whose sisters have married jihadists and the old men who can point them to the arms caches and smuggling routes.

A short ride to the east of us, thousands of refugees a day were crossing over from Mali toward camps and watering-places near M’bera. The city of Kidal, the ‘historic fief’ of the Tuareg, who in 2012 rose up to take control of northern Mali, was recovered last November by the Malian army and their Russian allies. For at least a few hours, the death’s-head flag of the mercenary Wagner Group flew over the city’s colonial-era fort. The soldiers with us had all seen the photo. At night around the campfire, they talked earnestly about what it portended.

Mauritania has become an uneasy haven from the upheaval that has been ‘shredding the social fabric’ of the Sahel, as Guterres put it. The once-sleepy capital of Nouakchott is booming, a refuge for agents of armed groups, and the locus of geopolitical competition. why everyone is courting mauritania ran a September headline in Foreign Policy. ‘NATO, China, Russia, and regional powers all want closer ties.’ Migrants from war-torn countries like Mali and Sudan have come by the tens of thousands to prospect for gold in Mauritania’s deserts, much of which would be smuggled to refineries in Dubai.

‘There,’ M’bérik pointed northeast, toward the trackless frontier inhabited only by gold prospectors, smugglers, and nomads. ‘It is plein désert,’ – the full desert. ‘We go nine days to places no 4×4 can go. No one has a compass. No one has a GPS.’ Many Mauritanians consider it vaguely shameful to rely on maps or devices to navigate the desert. ‘And there are many mean people there.’ 

I asked him how they didn’t get lost. ‘Monsieur James,’ he chided me. ‘Nous sommes les gens du terrain.’

I was back in Mauritania for the first time in fifteen years. In 2008, when I was twenty-one, I moved to Mauritania to work as the logistics chief for a crew of pilots and geophysicists exploring for resources in the far northeastern region of the country, near the borders with Mali and Algeria. At the time, the global economy was several years into a boom in resource prices known as the commodity ‘super-cycle’, which many economists and development gurus expected would bring prosperity to African resource-exporting nations. The country’s first major gold mine, near the Atlantic coast at a site called Tasiast, would soon be developed by the Canadian mining firm Kinross. The few bars of the capital Nouakchott were full every night with South Africans, Australians, Britons, and Canadians – all involved in developing mines or offshore oil and gas fields. The first night I drank a few beers with the American Ambassador, who predicted great things for the region. ‘It’s finally time,’ he said. ‘With everything they have here, someday it’ll look like Dubai.’

I lived for most of this time in a town called Zouérat in the far northeast of the country, built around a set of iron mines developed by a French consortium in the 1960s. Until recently they represented the country’s only major source of export income, and by far its largest source of government revenue. If the American-led order really is an empire, then Zouérat was by definition a frontier town – a heavily guarded mining outpost at the outer edge of where the order held sway.

There was no paved road to the city. The only land route was a train line that served as an almost too-perfect synecdoche for the way that our system transfers resources from the periphery to the center – a thin capillary stretching deep into the desert, carrying back the substance used to build Western infrastructure. The train line has never been extended to the capital of Nouakchott, where a full half of the population lives. The iron leaves as ore, sometimes worth as much as $130 a ton. When some of the iron comes back, its worth is multiplied thousands of times, in the form of cars and building materials, and as the mining equipment and train engines used to haul it out in the first place.

Every empire has its ways of keeping order at its fringes. The Americans living those days in Mauritania arrived in the spring. They were taciturn pilots who landed in Beechcraft King Airs, planes that the Canadian pilots I worked with noted were the same kind that US law enforcement agencies use to monitor smugglers in the lake-strewn borderlands where Ontario, New York State, and the Iroquois reservations come together. It was a safe bet that the men were there to make surveillance flights, helping the Mauritanian military search for smugglers and fighters in what was then a force of about one thousand or so members of a newly formed franchise known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

The leadership of AQIM came from an elite of ethnic Arabs, most of them veterans of the civil war that began in Algeria in the early 1990s. They grew powerful and rich by smuggling drugs, guns, and cigarettes along the traditional trans-Saharan routes linking sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean. The commander of the group’s operations in Mauritania, an Algerian named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, became internationally famous under the nom-de-trafic Mister Marlboro.

Shortly before I got to Mauritania, a young ex-gangster named Sidi Ould Sidna orchestrated the kidnapping and beheading of four French tourists in the southern town of Aleg. A few weeks into my time in Zouérat, I traveled overland to the capital. When I got to the hotel I’d reserved I found shrapnel and burning thatch in the courtyard. A small Volkswagen parked outside had been positively aerated by gunfire. I had missed the assault by a few hours.

This attack was claimed by AQIM, which was earning tens of millions of dollars a year by kidnaping and ransoming Westerners. Sometimes smugglers in caravans would fire small arms at our planes, which flew at low altitudes making large survey maps showing what are known as anomalies – areas where magnetic or gravimetric readings indicate propitious areas to drill and sample. It was the first step in the long and expensive path toward mining development.

This development did not much benefit the people of Mauritania or its Sahelian neighbors. Mining creates little wealth for regular people – per dollar of revenue earned, it creates fewer jobs than almost any other industry. The wealth it creates comes in the form of resource rents paid directly to state coffers, and for it to benefit populations or create lasting development, a government needs to save and spend carefully to avoid falling into a vicious cycle of dependency. Mining exports raise the value of the local currency, making food and goods produced locally more expensive, which can leave a country even more dependent on resource exports to sustain itself. It’s a cycle that arose in many African countries in the years after they gained independence.

In 1974, Mauritania nationalized the company working the iron mines in Zouérat and redubbed it the Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière (SNIM). It also withdrew from the CFA Franc, the regional currency pegged to the franc and then to the euro that has made it impossible for France’s former African colonies to devalue their currencies to spend on infrastructure, security, or social programs. But it did not escape the resource trap. A large majority of people living in ‘extreme poverty’ on earth today live in African countries defined by the IMF as ‘resource-rich’.

I was elected to be our project’s ‘crew chief’, which meant that I oversaw demobilization of our project. My last duty was to deliver a CD containing the data from our $7.5 million project to the local offices of Rio Tinto, the Anglo–Australian mining behemoth. I was conflicted about this final act, which seemed to implicate me more directly than I was ready to accept in the process of binding this country of nomads to the rich world. But I was twenty-one, and a small cog in a process that then seemed inexorable. I handed the disk off to a South African geophysicist with a salt-and-pepper beard and an old-hippie vibe, who offered me tea as he unwrapped the disc and carefully wrote out a label for it. ‘Where should I put this?’ he muttered as he looked around the messy office. ‘You know, I have quite a few of these lying around.’

The country I arrived in last December was not the Mauritania I remembered. It was in the midst of an upheaval that had transfigured the whole society. The change was part of a chain reaction that had been set off when France, in 2011, had pushed for the NATO bombing campaign that drove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. Gaddafi had offered training and refuge to Tuareg rebels from the north of Mali. After he fell, the Tuareg retrieved thousands of small arms and heavy weaponry such as SA-7 mobile rocket launchers from Libyan weapons caches, and joined in a brief but consequential alliance with al-Qaeda, which had always wanted a regional war. ‘Back then I was on the dark web all the time,’ Rudy Attalah, who had been George W. Bush’s head of counterterrorism in Africa and now runs a think tank, told me. ‘And there was this map they shared, with black arrows all pointing directly to Bamako. They said, if Mali falls, all of West Africa will fall.’ The alliance swept toward Bamako, and French troops intervened, in what became a deployment that would span three countries and last eight years.

The jihadist campaign in Mauritania had by this point become a part of life in the country. In the summer of 2009, AQIM murdered an American aid worker and carried out a suicide attack on the French Embassy in Nouakchott. A year earlier they targeted the vital iron mines and ambushed and killed twelve soldiers near Zouérat. They attacked the military barracks at Néma, and in 2011 they tried to assassinate President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who took power in a coup shortly after I left the country. And then everything
went quiet.

‘Various explanations were proffered,’ an intelligence brief by an American security consultant explained, about the mysterious and sudden peace that emerged. ‘Mauritania was good at counterterrorism; the government had made a deal with the devil; jihadi groups respected Mauritania’s neutrality.’

The truth may be a combination of all three. In 2016, American officials declassified a letter from 2010, found with Osama Bin Laden when US Navy Seals killed him at his secret compound in Pakistan. It discussed a possible truce with Mauritanian authorities, provided they pay ‘between ten to twenty million euros’ a year and agree to ‘not intercept the Mujahidin and cause any evil in the country’.

Even if there wasn’t an official deal, Mauritania found some arrangement that led the jihadists to turn their attention elsewhere. ‘It wasn’t that there were these attacks and our military did this great fighting,’ Yahya Loud, an Islamist opposition parliamentarian told me when I got to Nouakchott. ‘They just stopped.’ The country turned toward the Arab world, and Abdel Aziz oversaw an Islamicization of public life. ‘The average Mauritanian is already an extremist in their interpretation of Islam,’ Loud laughed. ‘They don’t see us as the enemy.’

Under the leadership of Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, who would go on to become president in 2019, the country developed a security apparatus that was far more supple than that of its neighbors, investing its new gold revenue in units specializing in mobile desert warfare, in the camel corps of the Groupement Nomade, and in intelligence. They monitored social media, and imprisoned and ‘corrected’ suspected enemies.

The war spread south, and a so-called ‘jihad noir’, formed in Burkina Faso and Niger. When a wave of coups brought populist and anti-Western leaders to power in the three countries of the central Sahel, Mauritania became the region’s strategic free agent. The government struck a military agreement with Saudi Arabia in 2017. The United Arab Emirates pledged a $2 billion investment package in 2020, amid rumors it planned to build a drone base in the northeast. As the country looked to become a gas exporter by the end of 2023, interest and investment flooded in from powers across the world.

Villas the like of which I never imagined seeing when I first lived in Mauritania began to appear behind high walls on the outskirts of Nouakchott. In July 2023, Ghazouani met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping for the second time in the space of eight months. ‘These meetings underscore Mauritania’s status as the sole bastion of relative political stability in the Sahel region,’ Foreign Policy reported. It was a sign of the ‘the often-overlooked intensification of geostrategic competition in Mauritania’.

‘You’re surprised?’ the driver who picked me up at Nouakchott’s modern new airport asked. ‘There’s a lot of money in Nouakchott now. A lot a lot of money. It’s the gold.’ He was proud of the new growth, and that the country was at peace. ‘What we have is a military government,’ he said. ‘We have elections but we go from one strong man in the military to the next. Not many people know Mauritania, but we’re developing, we have peace, we are the example for all of West Africa. For all the Sahel. We are the only peaceful country.’

In Nouakchott, I hired a fixer named Ely Cheikh Mohamed to help me see the gold rush that was at the center of the region’s upheaval.