Atrocities, poverty and white mercenaries in southern Africa’s Islamist insurgency

By Tim Sigsworth

Concrete structures – homes, shops, livelihoods – stand charred, their corrugated roofs are either caved in or burned to a cinder.

Ten men, in two groups, lie face down atop fallen leaves. Shirtless, bounded, blindfolded.

A rusting, white flat-bed truck races along an asphalt road. Men, too many to count, are packed together in a jigsaw of twisted limbs. Several are marked by unhealed bullet wounds, but they are alive. For now. Their captors, three of them, sit on the side of the truck. Two wear balaclavas.

Flesh, pink flesh against black skin. A dozen suspected militants are dead, executed extrajudicially by the Mozambican army.

This is the aftermath of the recapture by government forces of Mocimboa da Praia, a coastal town in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, on 30 June. These four fleeting glimpses, circulated online by local media outlets with limited accompanying information, are not provably chronological but nevertheless show the realities of an insurgency which has resurged dramatically in recent months.

Since March 2017, when the same town was attacked in a predawn assault on three police stations, an Islamist insurrection has rumbled on here in the country’s northeast, leaving 255,000 displaced and 1,501 dead, 967 of whom were civilians. It is being conducted by Ansar Al-Sunna, known locally as Al-Shabab [sic], a group which opposes mainstream Mozambican Muslims’ Wahhabist doctrine and favours the establishment of a Caliphate run according to Shari’a Law.

Islamic State’s Central Africa Province, which claims vast swathes of the continent’s hinterland, has proclaimed responsibility for attacks with increasing regularity since it claimed its first in July of last year. Ansar al-Sunna militants have pledged allegiance to IS in online videos and have also been trained and armed by international Islamist links, but the extent to which the insurgency is co-ordinated or led by Islamic State is limited.

Neither does Total’s liquefied natural gas project, located off Cabo Delgado’s Indian Ocean coast, appear to have much to do with the insurgency beyond stoking existing discontent with insufficient government investment. Importantly, despite persistent press references to the project, no attacks have ever been conducted by militants against it directly, though a vehicle belonging to a construction firm working with Total was attacked in June at a cost of eight lives.

The insurgency’s origins, as per the latest fieldwork, are instead predominantly local. As a group, the origins of Ansar al-Sunna can be found in a fundamentalist sect founded in 2007 and formally denounced by the Conselho Islamico de Mozambique (CISLAMO), the country’s Wahhabi governing body, in 2011. Subsequently forced underground by the secular state and its religious auxiliaries, by 2017 it had militarised and established itself in six districts – Montepuez, Macomia, Quissanga, Mocimboa, Nangade and Palma – as a fundamentalist group determined to bring about an Islamic state through armed jihad.

The group’s foothold, however, was gained and has been consolidated for reasons far removed from religion. Cabo Delgado’s Muslims, like those elsewhere in the country, are overwhelmingly Sufi and thus are as removed, if not more so, from the jihadists’ doctrine as you and I would be. This much is clear from the number of and violence involved in attacks against civilians, as well as the great numbers who have been internally displaced, the vast bulk of whom have fled to the regional capital at Pemba.

Indeed, it is the absence of any semblance of active government, rather than any exceptional ideological fervour or military genius on the insurgents’ part, which has created the conditions for discontent, dissent and, ultimately, radicalisation. For its status as the most impoverished of Mozambique’s ten provinces, Cabo Delgado is colloquially known as Cabo Esquecido, the forgotten cape. Its illiteracy rates are a third higher than the national average, 79 per cent of its people eke out an existence as subsistence farmers, and the government’s seeming inexistence has long facilitated a corridor for drug trafficking from Asia to the West, particularly for Afghan-grown heroin.

All this, despite it being the birthplace of FRELIMO, the once-revolutionary ruling party whose cabal of idle leaders has been sitting pretty in Maputo, the capital located 1,038 miles to Cabo Delgado’s south, since independence from Portugal in 1975.

Nothing exemplifies this rot more so than the response of Mozambique’s woefully ill-equipped, insufficiently trained and overwhelmingly young armed forces. Human rights have been suspended in the province, giving the army free rein to use the same heavy-handed tactics used against FRELIMO by similarly overstretched Portuguese colonial forces half a century ago. Arrests, detentions, intimidation, torture and execution is dished out at the commander’s behest. “Army officials have become their own lords”, as one report puts it, much to the benefit of Ansar al-Sunna’s consequently bolstered recruitment endeavours.

As is the norm in sub-Saharan nations gripped by war, mercenaries are involved. An initial three-strong helicopter force led by 76-year-old Lt. Gen. Lionel Dyck, a former commander in the Rhodesian and Zimbabwean armies, was expanded last month into a larger operation. One aim of his Dyck Advisory Group (DAG) is to eventually emulate the fireforce tactics – surprise attacks in which small groups of soldiers are dropped into an insurgent area via helicopter – of their commander’s Rhodesian days. Whether their Mozambican comrades are able to provide the reconnaissance and ground support required for this tactic of vertical envelopment is another matter, and, for the moment, DAG are hamstrung by the location of their base in Pemba, meaning that they can only engage the enemy for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time in the province’s north and west before having to return to refuel.

“The stakes are extremely high,” said Dyck to africaunauthorised.com, “but the Mozambique Defence Forces are unprepared and under-resourced and we have to move fast. Some of the atrocities committed are unlike anything I have seen before and I’ve seen a lot of wars, in a lot of different places.

“The massacre that followed the attack on Quissanga Police Post involved the mutilation of bodies, severing of limbs and we believe the attackers ate some of the body parts. Despite this barbarism, this enemy is organised, motivated and well equipped. If we don’t get on top of this, it’s going to spread south fast and that will be a catastrophe for the entire region.”

A conclusion doesn’t seem to be on the horizon any time soon; Mozambique’s appeals to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola for an intervention appear to have fallen on deaf or uninterested ears in spite of the impact that a nationwide or even half-nationwide insurgency would have on southern Africa as a whole.

And as an impotent ruling party, fat on the patrimonial proceeds of power, struggles to muster itself for the fight it once fought, the humanitarian cost for a desperately impoverished population is set to rise ever higher.

Image: A screenshot of a propaganda video by Islamic State’s Central Africa Province