What about the devil on our doorstep? The bloody conflict raging in Moz

The dhows and motorised fishing boats slipped ashore under cover of darkness. Witnesses later described seeing at least 20 insurgents on Matemo Island, a 24km² outcrop of palm groves and white sand beaches about 90km north of Pemba in Mozambique.

The men — some of whom wore Mozambican military fatigues — told them they were there to defend them. Then the looting and burning began.

The insurgents, known locally as al-Shabaab (though unrelated to al-Shabaab in Somalia), took as much rice, flour and food as they could find, set homes and buildings alight and then split into two groups.

One group set off for the mainland with the plunder. The others stayed to wait for the government forces they knew would inevitably launch a counterattack. Hours later, Mozambican soldiers stormed the island by boat and helicopter. A ferocious firefight erupted, the first salvos in a bloody battle that would rage for three days.

It is unclear exactly how many people died that night and in the days that followed last month as Mozambican and Southern African Development Community Mission in Mozambique (Samim) forces fought to retake the island.

Cabo Ligado, an independent conflict observatory monitoring political violence in Mozambique, put the death toll at between 17 and 24, but it may have been higher. 

A communiqué issued by the Islamic State Central Africa Province (Iscap) on Telegram and other encrypted messenger services used by Islamic State (Isis) supporters claimed insurgents had killed seven government soldiers.

Video circulated on Isis channels showed the bodies of at least five dead soldiers covered in blood and sand. (In keeping with their conservative strain of Islam, the video’s editors blurred the dead men’s uncovered stomachs and underwear to avoid offending viewers, yet lingered on their exposed faces and the dreadful wounds they had suffered.) In a final obscenity, the corpses were beheaded and left to rot.

The attack on Matemo Island, which resulted in what Cabo Ligado described as “one of the most significant clashes between insurgents and security forces in recent months”, was not the first and will likely not be the last.

In February this year insurgents invaded the island, home to at least 1,000 families displaced by the conflict in northern Mozambique, looted food supplies and torched what Isis described as 60 “Christian houses”.

The local clinic was also burnt. Initial estimates put the death toll at three, but another source told Zitamar News as many as 19 people had been killed.

A small number of South African nationals are also reported to have joined the insurgents in Mozambique, enticed by the appeal of Isis propaganda

Now as the rainy season — which gave al-Shabaab insurgents a chance to regroup — comes to an end, there are fears of a renewed escalation in the conflict in Cabo Delgado, and potential expansion into neighbouring Niassa and Nampula provinces.

While the eyes of the world are justifiably focused on the invasion of Ukraine, the shocking evidence of war crimes apparently committed by Russian soldiers against civilians in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere and the threat of a nuclear Russia to Europe and the wider world, conflicts in Africa rage largely unnoticed. 

Many of them involve Isis affiliates in Nigeria, the Sahel, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mozambique. Extrajudicial killings, massacres of civilians, torture, rape and other human rights abuses by militants and government security forces alike are rife, yet international pressure and calls for investigations and prosecutions remain largely muted.

There is no blanket coverage of these conflicts, and the hordes of cameramen, war reporters and foreign correspondents, the likes of which have descended on Lviv, Odesa and Kyiv, are nowhere to be found.

Since 2017, when a ragtag group of militants launched a series of attacks on government buildings and police stations in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province, where Matemo Island is situated, close to 4,000 people have been killed.

Of that number, the Cabo Ligado project says “organised violence targeting civilians” involving both insurgents and security forces has led to at least 1,691 deaths. 

For Isis, which since 2019 has lost both its last claim to territory in Iraq and Syria and two leaders in succession, African alliances are of vital importance, allowing it to push its agenda on multiple fronts even in the absence of a central caliphate.

What the grim videos of battles and executions did for Isis in Iraq and Syria, propaganda videos of killings and clashes between militants and government forces in Nigeria, DRC and Mozambique do as recruitment tools for new generations of Isis fighters.  

Since mid-2019, for example, the Mozambique insurgency has been covered in more than 40 editions of Al-Nabū, the official Isis newsletter, and also in brief communiqués distributed as jpeg images under the banner of Isis on Telegram and the like. Over time the propaganda messaging has become more frequent and sophisticated, seeking to show the ongoing viability of the insurgent force despite the intervention of Rwandan and Sadc forces, which have recaptured territory from al-Shabaab that the Mozambican military was unable to. 

This conflict, like other jihadist conflicts in Africa, is sorely underreported. In part, this is because access is limited and tightly controlled by the Mozambican government and Rwandan forces deployed in the country.

For Mozambican journalists, work in Cabo Delgado is particularly hazardous. Several have been arrested, and some assaulted and tortured.

A community radio journalist, Ibrahimo Mbaruco, vanished without trace in April two years ago. His last text message said he had been “surrounded by soldiers”. 

British journalist Tom Bowker, co-founder of Zitamar News, which has provided in-depth coverage of the conflict, was summarily expelled from Mozambique in February last year. 

Despite the potential regional implications of an Isis insurgency in Southern Africa and a humanitarian crisis that has seen close to 1-million people displaced from their homes, much of the media coverage in neighbouring countries, many of which — SA among them — contribute personnel for the Samim troop deployment, has ranged from superficial to sensationalist. 

Skewed media priorities are partly to blame. When a South African television channel can send a camera crew halfway around the world to interview Ukrainian refugees in Poland, but not the 450km from Johannesburg across the border to Maputo or the 2,000km to Pemba to speak to refugees fleeing the insurgency in Cabo Delgado, something seems off-balance.   

Much of the media coverage in neighbouring countries has ranged from superficial to sensationalist 

Budget cutbacks and shrinking newsrooms have forced news organisations to become more insular, focusing on local scandal and the tangled intricacies of party politics rather than looking beyond our borders at our place in the region and in Africa.

Ignorance of the complex political situations in our nearest neighbours adds fuel to the hateful — sometimes murderous — Afrophobia and xenophobia becoming all too deeply entrenched in SA.

But these conflicts are not as far away from SA as the meagre coverage would suggest. They are on our doorstep.  In March this year, the US treasury announced sanctions against four alleged financiers of Isis, all of whom are based in SA.

One stands accused of supplying weapons to the affiliate in Mozambique, the others of providing financial support to Isis in Iraq and Syria. Two have been accused of carrying out criminal activities to fundraise for the group,  including extortion, kidnap for ransom and robberies. 

That four Isis financiers were allegedly able to operate in SA, then were sanctioned by the US rather than being prosecuted successfully in their own country, speaks volumes about the South African state’s capacity to investigate and prosecute cases of terrorism financing. 

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) — a global intergovernmental watchdog of money-laundering and terrorist financing — published a report in October 2021 which said that “SA has failed to demonstrate that it is effectively identifying, investigating or prosecuting terrorist financiers or addressing terrorism finance through alternate measures”. 

Even though South African political discourse seems ever-more isolated and incurious about the world beyond its borders, surely the state’s seeming inability to investigate people financing terrorism in neighbouring countries should be cause for alarm?

A small number of South African nationals are also reported to have joined the insurgents in Mozambique, enticed by the Isis propaganda. Estimating the number of South African fighters is a challenging task, not least because some have reportedly been killed in the fighting, or have simply been unable to stomach the brutal conditions facing al-Shabaab fighters in Cabo Delgado and have quickly returned home.   

Dubbed Cabo Esquecido or the “forgotten cape” because it has long been Mozambique’s poorest and most marginalised region, despite its abundant wealth of natural resources in rubies and natural gas, Cabo Delgado’s economic makeup could scarcely be better designed to inspire a violent uprising.

From the early days of Mozambique’s independence, the region’s politics and economy have been dominated by senior figures linked to the Frelimo government, often former generals.

The province has some of the highest levels of illiteracy and poverty in Mozambique. This chasm between rich and poor has continued to widen during the insurgency: while nearly 1-million people in northern Mozambique were classed by the UN as “extremely food insecure” as of September 2021, research has found that influential people linked to Frelimo have gained more control over mining concessions in Cabo Delgado.

Corruption is a characteristic feature of governance in the region and arguably the single most important factor shaping Mozambique’s economy. And the scale of corruption and elite control in Cabo Delgado is matched only by its extreme levels of marginalisation and poverty. 

The insurgency has fed on resentment of these economic injustices, which have also fractured communities along ethnic and religious lines.  In Muidumbe in April 2020, insurgent leader Bonomado Omar (also known as Ibn Omar) addressed assembled residents, saying his fighters had occupied the village “to show that the government of the day is unjust. It humiliates the poor and gives advantages to the rich.

The people who are detained are from the lower classes and this is not just. Whether people like it or not, we are defending Islam.” These are common themes in Isis propaganda.

The region is a key corridor for the illicit trafficking flows that traverse East Africa’s “Swahili coast”.

Drug-smuggling (chiefly involving heroin and, more recently, methamphetamines brought by dhow from Iran and Afghanistan), human smuggling, illicitly exported timber, illegal wildlife products and smuggled gems and gold all pass from or through Cabo Delgado.

The prevalence of organised crime has shaped the region’s political economy and contributed to the breakdown of governance in which the insurgency emerged.

Elite groups have cultivated business interests in sectors involved in the exploitation of Cabo Delgado’s wide range of natural resources, including mining, forestry and transport logistics.

For decades, the financial gains of northern Mozambique’s illicit economies, including drug trafficking and illegal logging, have also accrued to many of the same senior Frelimo figures and local business elites. 

Trafficking routes through northern Mozambique are resilient and have adapted to the conflict, by shifting away from areas where insurgents hold territory and the conflict is most intense.

By early 2021, drug-trafficking routes had moved south through southern Cabo Delgado and Nampula province and have remained there. This has created new, more southerly hubs for trafficking and illicit trade, for example in Nampula.

This means that while trafficking routes have shifted slightly, major drug-trafficking flows to SA and beyond still move through northern Mozambique.

Many in Mozambique are concerned that the interests of the Mozambican state — and Rwanda — lie primarily in securing and profiting from Cabo Delgado’s natural resources, in particular its gas fields, rather than addressing the local factors that  created the insurgency.

The state’s seeming inability to investigate people financing terrorism in neighbouring countries should be cause for alarm 

These factors — a breakdown in governance, poverty and economic exclusion, rampant corruption and organised crime, elite capture of resources, and ethnic and religious divides — all remain in place in Cabo Delgado.

The International Crisis Group, which has been monitoring the conflict, warned in February that “the insurgency will persist as a source of regional insecurity” if these issues are left unaddressed.  

To create sustainable peace in the region, the government, supported by Sadc and the international community, needs to invest in local development and ensure that such investment is transparent to local communities, establish service-oriented and transparent local governance, and address the drivers of corruption. 

Civil society must be afforded the freedom to play a meaningful role in conflict resolution, the media must be given unimpeded access to report openly, and the international community must provide direct support to the region and play a watchdog role over human rights abuses perpetrated by police and military.

Currently, the prevailing view in Mozambique is that the government will prioritise security for gas developments in Cabo Delgado, rather than sustainable development for the local population and improved governance.

This would create the risk of a resurgence of violence, making northern Mozambique a source of continuing instability that could have significant regional impact.

• Rademeyer is director for east and southern Africa at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. Stanyard is a senior analyst focusing on the region. This article draws on a new report, “Insurgency, illicit markets and corruption  — the Cabo Delgado conflict and its regional implications”, published by the Global Initiative and supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation.