Fatima gripped her newborn tightly against her chest as the Tuareg woman queued beneath the scorching Mauritanian afternoon sun to register herself and her child as refugees.

She was forced to flee the Malian town of Lere, near the border with Mauritania, after her community came under a total blockade by jihadists some two weeks ago.

Dressed in a brightly coloured tunic, she waited in the shade of an ochre wall in the Mauritanian border post of Fassala, alongside a few dozen others who had also fled the waxing insurgency in her west African country.

Since September, blockades such as that on Lere have been multiplying across Lere, carried out by jihadists from the JNIM, the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims.

The jihadists are simultaneously imposing a fuel blo

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