Bloody battles fought for control of port city

JOHANNESBURG — Fierce fighting for control of Mozambique’s strategic northern town of Palma left beheaded bodies strewn in the streets Monday, with heavily armed rebels battling army, police and a private military unit in several locations.

Thousands were estimated to be missing from the town, which held about 70,000 people before the attack began last Wednesday.

The Islamic State group on Monday claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was carried out by the Islamic State Central Africa Province, according to the SITE extremist monitoring group.

The rebel claim said the insurgents now control Palma’s banks, government offices, factories and army barracks, and that more than 55 people, including Mozambican army troops, Christians and foreigners were killed.

Earlier this month the United States declared Mozambique’s rebels to be a terrorist organization and announced it had sent military specialists to help train the Mozambican military to combat them.

Palma is the center of a multibilliondollar investment by Total, the French oil and gas company, to extract liquefied natural gas from offshore sites in the Indian Ocean. The gas deposits are estimated to be among the world’s largest and the investment by Total and others is reported to be $20 billion, one of the largest in Africa.

The battle for Palma forced Total to evacuate its large, fortified site a few miles outside of the city.

The fighting spread across the town Monday, according to Lionel Dyck, director of the Dyck Advisory Group, a private military company contracted by the Mozambican police to help fight the rebels.

The battle for Palma is expected to drastically worsen the humanitarian crisis in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province, where the rebels started violent attacks in 2017. The insurgents began as a few bands of disaffected and unemployed young Muslim men. They now likely number in the thousands, according to experts.

Known locally as alShabab, although they have no known affiliation with Somalia’s jihadist rebels of the same name, the rebels’ violence in Mozambique is blamed for the deaths of more than 2,600 people and caused an estimated 670,000 people to flee their homes.