Morale ‘very high’ as SADC troops score success in Moz
Morale is reportedly “very high” amongst the hundreds of troops from Botswana and other regional countries fighting terrorists in Mozambique, after a series of successes in which enemy camps and equipment have been seized.
SADC forces, led by South Africa and deputised by Botswana, deployed to Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province in July to fight a terrorist onslaught in the oil-rich province that has seen more than 3,000 people killed since 2017, with reports of beheadings, disembowelling of expectant mothers and other brutalities.
Botswana contributed 300 soldiers to the SADC forces with Commander in Chief, President Mokgweetsi Masisi, urging the troops to brace for a “deceptive enemy” likely to use “underhand tactics”.
The danger to the troops was demonstrated earlier this month, according to SADC Mission in Mozambique (SAMIM) spokesperson, Major Patrick Mfaladi of the Botswana Defence Force (BDF).
“On September 14, 2021, a SAMIM patrol was ambushed by insurgents but managed to fight their way out of the ambush without casualties or injuries to personnel, however one vehicle suffered minor damage,” he told Mmegi this week.
Precious few have escaped an attack by the Islamic state-linked terrorists, known as Al Sunnah wa Jama’ah. From October 2017 when they moved into northern Mozambique to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state there, the insurgents have engaged in a campaign of barely imaginable terror. The violence prompted President Masisi, who was then SADC’s defence and security chief, to rally the region to Mozambique’s assistance earlier this year.
“This decision follows an elongated period of commitment of heinous atrocities where people’s internal organs are taken out by the militants, people beheaded, pregnant mothers’ stomachs ripped open and babies strewn everywhere,” Masisi said in a media briefing in April upon returning from Maputo.
“The brutality is quite devastating.”
When SADC Heads of State gave the go-ahead to deploy in Mozambique in July, the insurgents were oozing with confidence, having pulled off deadly attacks on the town of Palma a few months before in March. In that attack, more than 200 terrorists attacked, killing scores, including citizens from South Africa, Britain and Zimbabwe.
According to Tim Lister, a CNN journalist who has covered multiple conflicts across the world, the Palma attack was “another stunning failure for Mozambique’s security forces, which proved unable to hold a town of 70,000 against a couple of hundred young militants”.
“The attack reverberated around the world because Palma was home to hundreds of foreign workers, most of them contractors for the Total Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project on the nearby Afungi Peninsula,” Lister wrote in the Combatting Terrorism Centre’s Sentinel publication.
“There were also indiscriminate attacks on civilians, with dozens and maybe more killed in their homes and on Palma’s streets during the initial attack.
“Residents reported that some of the dead had been beheaded, their bodies left in the streets.”
The region was stunned into action. Masisi would shuffle back and forth between Gaborone, Maputo and other regional capitals lobbying for direct military intervention. In Maputo, the initial reluctance to accept SADC’s states intervention by Filipe Nyusi’s government was eventually overcome and the region deployed to Cabo Delgado in July.
This week, SAMIM spokesperson, Mfaladi said the tide was slowly being turned in the war against the terrorists.
“When SAMIM arrived, there were already security forces in the operational area,” he explained.
“However, with the expertise and assets brought by SAMIM to support the Government of Mozambique, the insurgents have been dislodged from most of the areas they previously controlled and their activities disrupted.