Green Berets join hidden war as jihadists target children
Children as young as 11 are being killed by a shadowy armed group in Mozambique, as United States special forces arrive to train the beleaguered nation’s military.
One 28-year-old woman said the militants beheaded her 12-year-old son near where she was hiding with her three other children. ‘‘Our village was attacked and houses were burned,’’ she told the charity Save the Children.
A 29-year-old survivor of the attacks said armed men murdered her 11-year-old son, and that she did not have a chance to say goodbye or give him a proper burial. ‘‘We fled to my father’s house in another village, but a few days later the attacks started there.’’
Such horrors have become commonplace in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province. Since October 2017, a grim war has slowly torn through the pristine beaches and tropical bushland of the isolated region, killing at last 2400 people and forcing some 700,000 to flee.
Little is known about the secretive insurgents behind the attacks. Locally, the fighters are often referred to as al Shabaab, the Somalian jihadist group. The Mozambican insurgents have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, but it is unclear to what extent it is linked to the Middle Eastern group, though the US State Department has said there is a connection.
Most of the displaced are families from villages who have fled to the provincial capital, Pemba, and are now being hosted by NGOS or with local families. They find themselves without shelter, short of food, and battered day after day by heavy rains, extreme heat and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The United Nations estimates that almost 1 million people are in need of food aid.
While other African insurgencies such as those in the Sahel or Somalia have received massive international attention and peacekeeping forces, Mozambique has received almost no military aid. This week, however, the US started a two-month-long mission to train Mozambican marines.
The deployment of the Green Berets marks a fresh strategy by the authorities, who have been relying on foreign mercenaries to bolster their forces.
Islamic State began claiming credit last year for gains in Cabo Delgado by the militants, but the roots of the insurgency are homegrown. The province’s mostly Muslim population of 2.3 million has seen little of the area’s vast natural wealth, which includes the world’s biggest ruby mine and Africa’s largest energy project, a £44 billion (NZ$85B) liquefied natural gas development.
– Telegraph Group, The Times