Hunted by forces from southern African countries, plus Rwanda, Islamic extremists in Mozambique are splintering into tighter groups, and finding a haven in al-Qaeda training camps in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, according to security analysts and intelligence operatives.
The terrorists, who inhabitants of northern Mozambique call al-Shabab or al-Sunna wa Jama, claim direct affiliation to ISIS.
They’re being helped by several international terror networks to keep their insurgency alive, said Dino Mahtani, senior African terrorism researcher for the International Crisis Group.
Human Rights Watch and other violence monitors say about 4,000 people have been killed and 800,000 internally displaced since October 2017, which is when President Felipe Nyusi’s Frelimo party government said an “Islamic terrorist jihad” aimed at establishing sharia law in northern Mozambique began.
Troops from the country’s neighbors, mostly South Africa, bolstered by 2,000 Rwandan soldiers, were deployed to Cabo Delgado province in July last year, to assist the Mozambican army combat the terrorists.
The joint operation had brought a “measure of stability” to northern Mozambique, said Tomas Queface, a security analyst for the local Cabo Ligado Project, a group tracking the conflict.
He referred to the coastal districts of Palma and Mocimboa de Praia, scenes of multiple and deadly attacks by the terrorists in the past, but now controlled by Rwandan and Mozambican forces.
This, he said, had forced the extremists to target other areas, such as Matemo island and Nangade district.
Queface told the Epoch Times: “Al-Shabab has killed more than 200 unarmed civilians, some by beheading, since January … Mostly because they refused to join them.”
The insurgents had also abducted women and girls, he said.
The UNHCR said in a recent statement that since January a “series of attacks by non-state armed groups” had displaced about 24,000 people, with “hundreds of families reportedly still on the move.”
“Some 5,000 people have also sought protection in the neighbouring district of Mueda, a remote area bordering Tanzania," the agency added.
Those fleeing violence suffered and witnessed atrocities, including killings, the decapitation and dismemberment of bodies, sexual violence, kidnappings, forced recruitment by armed groups, and torture.
The threat of renewed violence means the number of people arriving in Mueda continues to increase.
The Maputo government’s official line is that “foreign jihadists” alone are responsible for the crisis in northern Mozambique.
Professor Armindo Ngunga, chairman of the government’s Integrated Development Agency for the North responsible for administration in the region, said, “This is not a conventional war which ends by signing an agreement, because in this particular case the terrorists are faceless; we don’t know who is behind them, who we could negotiate with. We as government are the ones who are the victims.”
But one of the world’s foremost experts on Mozambique, American social scientist Dr. Joseph Hanlon, now based at the United Kingdom’s Open University, argues that “external Islamic aggression” is not central to the conflict … But that it suits the Nyusi administration to present it as such, to absolve itself of any responsibility for the “chaos” and to cast itself as the primary victim.
Hanlon asked: “Are these really faceless people? Or are there grievances about lack of jobs, marginalization, and the failure of the majority to benefit from resources?
“This has clearly split Frelimo. The official line is there are no grievances. But even state media’s now raising the issue of grievances.”
The inhabitants of Cabo Delgado province, in particular, have traditionally supported the opposition Renamo party, and have long been neglected by Maputo in terms of development.
However, the state has invested billions of dollars in oil and gas projects, as well as diamond and ruby mines, in Cabo Delgado.
Yet locals—who mostly survive as small-scale farmers and fisherfolk—haven’t benefited at all down the years, said Hanlon, with the government instead partnering with foreign firms, including Total of France, and foreign businesspeople to exploit the region’s riches.
Anger and resentment have mounted in the province, opening the door to several global jihadist organizations to gain a foothold in southern Africa by arming and training disaffected Mozambicans, said Mahtani.
“The genesis of this crisis is Mozambican, with a foreign plug-in,” he maintained. “The rank-and-file and the majority of fighters are angry, young Mozambican men.
“A good proportion of the senior leaders are certainly indoctrinated and are using the cloak of Islamic jihadism to present themselves as sort of millenarian warriors fighting against a corrupt state, but also trying to implement sharia law.”
For more than three years, the terrorists have attacked villages and towns, sometimes beheading people they accuse of transgressing their version of Islamic doctrine.
But Mahtani isn’t convinced that many of the rebels are dedicated to jihad, or “holy war.”
“When you look at the motivations of local fighters, often they may desert or want to leave if their payments aren’t coming in. So, they are in large part motivated by illicit finances, recruitment money, coming into their hands.”
He said it was no coincidence that the insurgency in Mozambique began shortly after authorities in neighboring Tanzania targeted Islamic extremist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda in 2017.
“These young men were cracked down upon in Tanzania. Many of them drifted into Mozambique. They brought that ideology with them.
“They merged and fused with the Mozambican militants. They’ve played a role by at times moving back into Tanzania, coming back and forth for different periods of the fighting.”
With southern African and Rwandese troops now active across Cabo Delgado, said Mahtani, these al-Qaeda trained fighters were hiding across east Africa, and beyond.
He told The Epoch Times that ISIS was trying to “co-opt this network and bring it out of al-Qaeda’s camp and into the ISIS camp, mainly through the dissemination of money.”
Mahtani said ISIS cells specializing in illicit financial flows and based in Kenya have been bankrolling insurgents not only in Mozambique, but also in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Tanzania and Uganda.
He added that many east African terrorists flushed from their safe houses by security force operations in their home countries were now based in ISIS training camps in eastern DRC. From there, he said, they “intermittently” join the fight in Mozambique.
“There’s a toing-and-froing of Swahili coast boys participating in violent conflict in Cabo Delgado, but also in eastern Congo … New information we have lends credibility to reports of Mozambicans in the past who’ve been trained in these camps in eastern Congo.”
The latest Crisis Group report on the insurgency in Mozambique describes how militants are finding ways to adapt to the Rwandan-southern African military pressure, pushing into neighboring Niassa province and staging attacks in Tanzania.
It continues: “They are also trying to deploy more improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on the battlefield.
“Officials fear that al-Shabab fighters will seek money and training, including in bombmaking skills, from east African ISIS networks, such as that based in the northern tip of Puntland, Somalia, to keep their campaign going.”
Authorities in South Africa are voicing increasing concern having watched ISIS influence grow in the country over the past few years. However, there have been several arrests and planned bombings of synagogues and Jewish schools were prevented.
A South African military intelligence operative monitoring developments in northern Mozambique told The Epoch Times there was now a “real danger” of the insurgents, “linking up with the (ISIS-affiliated) Allied Democratic Forces in DRC.
“We have information from interrogations of captured al-Shabab fighters that the ADF is helping to train Mozambican fighters.
“We are already seeing how successful counterterrorism operations in northern Mozambique are resulting in a jump in terror attacks in Tanzania, for example.”
All of this taken together, said Mahtani, showed there was close cooperation between several international and multinational terror networks across Africa. They exchanged intelligence, money, weapons, fighters and much more.
He said these fluid but strong alliances meant that when an insurgency was crushed in a particular area, others were likely to emerge elsewhere.
