Troops from across Africa take the fight to jihadists on rampage in Mozambique
A PAN-AFRICAN military force has launched an operation to drive jihadists out of northern Mozambique, months after the group’s bloody raid on the town of Palma led to the cancellation of the largest investment project on the continent.
Last week, 1,000 troops from Rwanda landed in the southern African nation to prop up beleaguered government forces.
They killed 30 alleged terrorists while out on a forest patrol near Palma earlier this week, according to reports.
South African soldiers have recently landed in the country to lay the groundwork for a potentially larger multinational force from the wider region.
The Southern African Development Community, a regional economic community of 16 states, is organising the military response but it is not clear how the force will be funded, as many countries are short of equipment and money.
Observers hope the intervention could end the extreme violence that has plagued the resource-rich Cabo Delgado province for the past three years, killing nearly 3,000 people and displacing some 800,000.
Little is known about the jihadist group. Locally it is known as al-shabaab, in reference to the jihadist group that has brought Somalia to its knees.
The insurgency has grown out of decades of neglect by the central government and battles over natural resources.
Luisa Victor, 28, a mother of five who was imprisoned for a month by the group as a slave, said: “I was chatting with a friend. Then we heard gunshots in the same hour. Everyone knows that war begins with a signal.” Moments later, armed insurgents stormed Ms Victor’s village in Cabo Delgado.
They burnt houses to the ground, beheaded people and captured women and children, including Ms Victor and her baby.
“I was scared and shaking, and I was crying,” says Ms Victor. “I couldn’t look at them.”
The US officially designated the jihadists as a global terrorist organisation – Isil Mozambique – in March this year. However, several international scholars including from Oxford University say there are no proven links to Islamic State in the Middle East.
In late March, the insurgents killed more than a hundred civilians in Palma, including a British expatriate worker.
The attack forced Total, the French energy titan, to spend its $20billion project to build a natural gas plant on the region’s Afungi peninsula.