What Islam Has Wrought

"These guys are different. What they do to the people they capture and kill I have never seen anywhere in Africa, and I have been in a lot of places in Africa."

"When you mutilate people after you kill them, you cut their bodies in half, you skin them, you cut their heads off and then you cut their limbs off ... the brutality is unbelievable."

"The locals have been bullied by all kinds of people. So I think you need a concerted effort to clear an area, control it, and put in schools, hospitals, police stations, all those things you need."

"And hold them -- don't just put them there and desert them."

Lionel Dyck, Zimbabwean mercenary

"Nine percent of them are probably local recruits, around a very small hard core of real committed Islamists."

"Why was Palma a target? There are not many rich targets left, and loot and food and redistribution of goodies is important because I am sure religion is not the primary motivation for many of their fighters."

"It is about dialogue, so you have to accept that some of these insurgents you have to talk to."

Alex Vines, head, Africa program, Chatham House

A woman, called Elsa by UK-based aid group Save the Children, walks with a child in a displacement camp in the northern Mozambique province of Cabo Delgado on January 26, 2021. © Rui Mutemba/Save the Children/REUTERS

Last week the Mozambican town of Palma was assaulted by Islamist terrorists in an attack of appalling inhumanity, reports of which shocked the world community. Hundreds of well-armed terrorists took possession of the entire town, there is no longer any vestiges of law and order, civilians who manage to evade being murdered and dismembered are on their own to protect themselves and their families, even as the psychopathic attackers gorge themselves on slaughter, knowing there is no authority to bring an end to their atrocities.

This is in the nature of Islamist insurgencies, but this one in particular has distinguished itself by the level of its ghoulish brutality. The insurgency has managed to grow in strength for close to four years, despite government tasking the country's military forces to counter and combat it. The government signed a contract with a mercenary outfit, a private security firm hired to help the military quell the insurgency. The level of bloodthirsty atrocities encountered by the mercenaries has shocked even its experienced head, Lionel Dyck.

In Mozambique's remote Cabo Delgado province locals refer to the insurgents as "mysterious", as "Islamist", or "Islamic State-linked". They have, in fact, identified themselves as having adopted the principles and the ideology and the methodology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. And ISIL has returned the compliment, hailing itself as the benefactor and command-control of the insurgency, voluntarily linking its goals to that of ISIL.

 

The United States named one individual as a controlling member of the group which it officially labelled a terrorist organization on March 10; Abu Yassir Hassan, considered to be the leader of the movement, and a Tanzanian cleric. This is an uprising destabilizing Mozambique quite unlike similar insurrections occurring in other countries of Africa facing guerrilla war outbreaks. In October of 2017 30 youths armed with machetes surrounded the Mocimboa da Praia police station, where they slaughtered those within, ordering Sharia law on the locals.

The movement has been identified by academics as having had its genesis a decade earlier when a sect emerged that clashed with the local Sufis and Gulf-funded Wahabbi Muslim area leaders. The origins of the sect has been traced to a preacher called Sualehe Rafayel. Eric Morier-Genoud of Queen's University Belfast, writes that in 2007 Sualehe Rafavel returned to Cabo Delgada having spent several years in neighbouring Tanzania.

He founded a group that set about establishing mosques across the region, gaining a reputation for spurning the secular state and over the years to follow, Muslim leaders and the state grew increasingly tense relations in the wake of government efforts to suppress the activities of the sect. Access to manpower, money and weapons was extended by allying with miners, illicit traders and organized crime groups around 2016, who were forced out of business, evicted from a rich ruby field in favour of a legal mine.

Following that era, the group expanded steadily to attain an arsenal of weapons, raiding Mozambican police and military units and looting their weaponry. Rocket-propelled grenades and mortars have also recently come into their possession. Evidence exists that some members were trained in the Congo and in Somalia. South African extremists joined the group, which in 2019 declared its allegiance to Islamic State. 

An estimated 700,000 people have now been displaced by the ongoing conflict, fleeing their homes in a desperate search for refuge from the violence. The increasingly emptying countryside has resulted in surging food shortages and attacks against army-escorted supply convoys, while a severe lack of potable water has contributed to an outbreak of cholera. Amnesty International last month accused the insurgents, the Mozambican government, and the Dyck Advisory Group of war crimes.

The insurgency can no longer use Tanzania as a rear area base, since a clampdown by Tanzanian security forces last year. The militants were pushed back from threatening the provincial capital of Pemba by Col.Dyck's force of 18 helicopter-borne mercenaries deployed by contract a year ago. Mozambique president Filipe Nyusi has offered amnesty to Islamist insurgents who have surrendered. 

 

And it is Col.Dyck's experienced impression that re-establishing order in the province can be achieved only through dialogue, attributing many of the more recent members of the insurgent group to impoverished locals joining up, whose needs the central government has seen fit to ignore.

"On March 10, the State Department announced the designation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-Mozambique (ISIS-Mozambique) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-Democratic Republic of the Congo (ISIS-DRC) as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) while also designating respective leaders of those organizations, Abu Yasir Hassan and Seka Musa Baluku, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs)."

"In the case of Mozambique, this decision is a response to the growing threat posed by Ahlu Sunna wa Jama (ASWJ), known as ISIS-Mozambique in U.S. government circles, which operates in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province. Violence escalated dramatically in 2020; the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) reported more than 570 violent attacks, including attacks in Tanzania. There have been widespread allegations of human rights abuses by ASWJ, Mozambican forces, and private military contractors (PMCs) operating at the behest of the Mozambican government. The violence has led to the displacement of over 670,000 people, caused major food shortages and market disruptions, and led to a pervasive sense of insecurity. Nearly 700,000 people in Cabo Delgado are in need of some form of basic assistance."

CSIS - Center for Strategic and International Studies