Ahmedou Ould Boukhary leads the Brigade Anti-Feu, a volunteer force of about 500 Malian refugees living in M’bera camp in south-east Mauritania. The brigade responds to calls from local authorities to tackle scrubland fires, often travelling up to 20 miles to reach the blazes.
Equipped with little more than axes and tree branches, and without using water, the teams have helped extinguish 36 fires since October during the most recent dry season. Volunteers form lines and sweep at the ground with makeshift brooms made from tree branches, stamping out fires in the arid landscape.
“It’s a little tiring, it’s a little risky,” said Mine Hamada, a brigade leader. “We have the courage to not be afraid. We’re brave – we go at midnight, we go at 1am … There are snakes, there’s everything – but we attack the wildfires.”
Founded in 2013 by the Mauritanian NGO SOS Desert, local authorities, and the UN refugee agency, the brigade also works to mitigate fire risks by cutting down trees and shrubs to create firebreaks, and planting trees as part of the Great Green Wall reforestation project. Miraculously, the brigade has only incurred one injury in nine years.
Boukhary said the volunteers take on the dangerous work to protect their area and out of gratitude to their Mauritanian hosts. “We intervene to help them. Because we’re refugees on their territory. No one asked us to ‘Do this, do that’ – it’s our initiative,” he said.
