Panic on streets of Mozambique
HUGE RESCUE MISSION SEES EXPATS FLEEING PALMA BY AIR, LAND, SEA AFTER TERRORIST ATTACK LEAVES DOZENS DEAD
With air-conditioned rooms, a swimming pool and open-air restaurant, the Amarula Lodge hotel was an oasis of calm for expatriate workers in the town of Palma in northern Mozambique.
It was also an oasis of safety: amid a growing threat from local Islamist militants, the hotel's well-guarded compound was one of the few deemed secure from attack.
Last Wednesday afternoon, though, the hotel found itself at the epicentre of one of Africa's largest-scale terrorist strikes, as hundreds of gunmen stormed Palma in a murderous rampage, littering the streets with beheaded corpses.
As panic spread through the town, some 200 expatriate workers — most of them servicing the newly built gas hub on the nearby Afungi peninsula — gathered at the hotel as a muster point.
But after 48 hours under siege, some tried to make a break for it, setting off in a 17-vehicle convoy on Friday afternoon, which then came under immediate attack.
Only seven vehicles got through, and at least seven people are feared to have been killed, including Philip Mawer, a British contractor working with a local facilities management firm.
On Monday night, Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for attacking Palma, saying in a gleeful statement it had killed at least 55 people, including troops and “members of Crusader states.”
Meanwhile, desperate efforts were ongoing to locate and rescue thousands of people still trapped in the town, amid reports that the militants were still in control despite claims by Mozambican security forces to have retaken it.
“It is absolutely terrible — the insurgents are still holding the town, and the local security forces aren't capable of fighting them,” said Brendon Bekker, the Zimbabwean director of KEA projects, a construction firm working locally. “There are still many hundreds of people missing: we alone have around 50 staff unaccounted for.”
Since Wednesday, both locals and expatriates have been fleeing the town of 75,000, exiting by air, land and sea. Some have been picked up by helicopters flown by the Dyck Advisory Group, a South African mercenary firm, whose pilots have been flying near-constant rescue missions, frequently coming under insurgent gunfire. Others have fled into the bush on foot, trekking for days toward the Tanzanian border, which lies nearly 50 kilometres north.
A flotilla of ships has also been mounting a Dunkirk-style evacuation operation, shipping thousands of people to the town of Pemba, 240 kilometres further south down the Mozambican coast.
Bekker took part in one such operation himself, sailing from Pemba to Palma in the Pelican Unity, an offshore supply vessel, on Wednesday night.
Two of Bekker's colleagues went in a smaller vessel to try to reach the beach, only for one of them to be shot dead when the militants opened fire on them from the shore.
That rescue effort had to be abandoned, but a second attempt managed to bring home 106 people on Sunday.
“When the insurgents first attacked Palma, they came in from about three different directions, and people scattered in every different direction,” Bekker said. “There was people all over the different beaches, everyone fearing for their lives and thinking they weren't going to make it out.”
The attack is the latest in a series of atrocities carried out by militants in the area, whose three-year insurgency across Mozambique's wider Cabo Delgado province has now claimed an estimated 2,600 lives and displaced around 700,000 people. It also raises questions over the US$20 billion gas project being built there by French energy giant Total, which has suspended its operations since last week.
On Monday, Lionel Dyck, whose Dyck Advisory Group mercenary firm is contracted to the Mozambican government, said his helicopters had rescued at least 230 people.
He also criticized Total, saying that the firm had done little to help with initial rescue efforts.
Bekker added that had Dyck's staff not flown in with helicopters, “thousands” of people could have been killed.
Henry Pitman, a British businessman who has invested in hotels in Cabo Delgado — one of which was destroyed by militants last September — said: “What is frustrating is that this attack had been predicted for months in advance. There had been warnings sent out by the insurgents to local people that they were coming to attack Palma, but the government made no preparations.”
UN agencies are now holding emergency talks to co-ordinate humanitarian aid and evacuations, while the international community is now anxious about the conflict spreading region-wide.
“This is a watershed moment in the conflict, and it is clear that the Mozambican armed forces are out of their depth,” said Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at London's Chatham House think tank.
THERE ARE STILL MANY HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE MISSING.