More than 300,000 people have been displaced by an Islamic State insurgency in Mozambique since July, amid growing fears that authorities lack a workable plan to end the fighting.
With wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan attracting more attention and foreign aid falling, the grinding conflict in Mozambique has been largely ignored or forgotten. More than 1 million people have been displaced, many of them two, three or even four times.
Muslims always be Killing.
A savage jihad — replete with massacres, beheadings, and sexual enslavement — has been raging in the Christian-majority nation of Mozambique since 2017.
Few in the West are aware of this, not least as the situation has been garbed in Marxist language that seeks to depict radical terrorists as “victims” and those resisting them, including the Mozambican government, as “oppressors.”
MAPUTO, Sept 7 (Reuters) – At least six people were beheaded and an Italian nun killed on Tuesday by Islamic State-linked insurgents in Mozambique’s Nampula province, authorities said on Wednesday.
Speaking in the resort town of Xai Xai north of the capital Maputo, President Filipe Nyusi said the insurgents unleashed a killing spree as they fled from soldiers from Mozambique, Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) sent to tackle the violence.
Suspected ISIS-linked extremists have decapitated a Christian pastor before handing his severed head to his wife to show authorities in Mozambique.
The killing, reported by local news, took place in the country’s gas-rich northern province of Cabo Delgado.
Last Wednesday, the man’s widow carried a sack containing the head of her husband to the district police headquarters, according to the BBC who cited military sources.
Pencils scratch as students in year eight feverishly work through an exam paper. At the back of the classroom, Clara Edna Chevambo, 37, a minute figure in hand-me-down clothes, finishes first and hands her paper to the teacher. As she leaves, her 11-year-old daughter is arriving for afternoon class. A vegetable farmer who supported, clothed and fed five children, her mother and her grandmother, Chevambo is now living in a borrowed tent in a camp, one of the ones with something to do to fill a few hours.
“I’m in school every day, and I don’t want to miss class. I send my daughter to school every day.”
Where she lived and farmed in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost region, bordering Tanzania, is too dangerous a place to be now war has engulfed the region. An estimated 800,000 people have been displaced by an Islamist insurgency that has killed 3,000 people since 2017. Known as al-Shabaab, although not linked to Somalia’s group of the same name, it has declared itself affiliated to Islamic State.
The bodies of 12 beheaded expats have been found after an ISIS massacre in a Mozambique town where a British worker was killed in a desperate escape bid.
The nationalities of the 12 people found ‘tied up and beheaded’ in the northern town of Palma cannot yet be confirmed, a local police commander said.
Their bodies were found near to natural gas projects worth £43.6billion.
They are all believed to be foreigners because they are white, Commander Pedro da Silva said.
The Islamic State group said Monday it had seized the coastal town of Palma in northern Mozambique, after days of fighting.
“The caliphate’s soldiers seize the strategic town of Palma” following a three-day attack against military and government targets that killed dozens, the group said in a statement on its Telegram channels.
The jihadist group’s claim came after thousands of survivors of coordinated jihadist attacks in the town fled on boats to the provincial capital, Pemba, according to sources in the city.
What’s behind the conflict?
The region has long experienced instability, but the insurgency involving Islamist militants began in 2017.
Local al-Shabab militia operating in the area are believed to have links to the wider Islamic state group (IS).
High levels of poverty and disputes over access to land and jobs have contributed to local grievances.
But Cabo Delgado’s importance for the government, and a further reason for local frustrations, lies in the rich off-shore natural gas reserves being explored in collaboration with multinational energy companies.
Al-Shabaab jihadists leading an insurgency in Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province of Mozambique, are now beheading children as young as 11. Military and humanitarian personnel working in the area reportedly say that they have never seen anything like the brutality that the terrorists have unleashed on the region with people “often hacked to death and mutilated with machetes” as well as “mass Islamic State-style beheadings”.
Aid agency Save the Children says Islamist militants are beheading children as young as 11 in Mozambique’s northern province of Cabo Delgado.
One mother told the agency she had had to watch as her 12-year-old son was killed in this way close to where she was hiding with her other children.
More than 2,500 people have been killed and 700,000 have fled their homes since an Islamist insurgency began in 2017.
The militants have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group.
Jihadists in northern Mozambique have intensified their military operations this year in an apparent attempt to establish an Islamic Emirate in the province of Cabo Delgado. The Islamist insurgency, which began in October 2017, remained below the radar until recently. The escalating violence, however, has become a security concern for Mozambique’s regional neighbors, including South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia. Radical Muslims from Kenya and Tanzania are transforming what was initially a low-intensity ethnic rebellion, into a full-fledged Islamic jihad against Mozambique’s central government.
