Soldiers from the Mozambican army patrol the streets following an attack from insurgents, on March 7, 2018 in Mocimboa da Praia, Mozambique [Adrien Barbier/AFP]
The recent raid by supposedly ISIL-linked insurgents on the northern Mozambican city of Palma, which left dozens of civilians dead and displaced 30,000 others, has given rise to a narrative that Africa is now a hotbed for international terror groups and should be the next main front in the global “war on terror. Such sweeping framing, if uncritically embraced, could result in the further militarisation of the region. But militarisation would not resolve, and may even exacerbate, Mozambique’s insurgency problem.
Overview
On March 24, 2021, operatives of ISIS’s Central Africa Province (actually, these are operatives of the local Ansar al-Sunna organization that pledged allegiance to ISIS)
[1] mounted a large-scale attack against Palma, a Mozambican coastal city with about 75,000 inhabitants, and took it over. The city is located in the Cabo Delgado Province, in northeastern Mozambique, the hub of the organization’s activity, near the largest natural gas field in Africa, where foreign companies are involved in the operation.
According to ISIS, the operatives mounted the attack from Mocímboa da Praia, a port city that ISIS took over on August 12, 2020. During the attack, which ISIS claimed lasted three days, ISIS operatives killed over 50 soldiers and Christian civilians, including citizens of Western countries, and there were reports of hundreds of people missing. ISIS operatives took over government and military buildings, government facilities and banks. They also seized large quanti
Antiwar.com Original
White faces in fatigues – I’m sure that’s
just what most Mozambicans were hoping to see upon their shores. After all, it certainly isn’t the first time. Ever since the Portuguese started planting trading posts and forts on what was known as the Swahili Coast around the year 1500, an arrival of armed whites has never really ended well for the locals. Now, if half a millennium late to the party, America recently shipped an army special forces detachment to the country.
The 12-man team hit the ground in mid-March, as part of a program that the
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