Regina Jasinto fled the violence with her family Credit: Kang-Chun Cheng
It was around eight in the morning and Regina Jasinto had just finished cooking breakfast when the jihadists burst out of the jungle and stormed into the village.
She could only watch as the fighters – their faces hidden behind masks and clad in mismatched camouflage fatigues – beheaded her neighbour with a machete.
In the ensuing pandemonium, she saw ramshackle kiosks selling produce going up in flames as she gathered up her three children and escaped.
“We fled to the bushes, with nothing but the clothes we were wearing,” she says as she painfully recounts the attack on Muidumbe in 2017 – she cannot remember the month.
Still in shock, she managed to guide her family through the brush to a main road. They flagged down a sympathetic driver who drove them nearly 200 miles south to the port city of Pemba.
Destitute farmers and fishermen are among the civilians to be forced from their villages by extremists Credit: Kang-Chun Cheng
Ms Jasinto and her family were among the first of more than 1.3 million civilians to be driven from their homes in northern Mozambique’s resource-rich Cabo Delgado province when an extremist group now affiliated with the Islamic State launched an insurgency that has now killed more than 6,000 people.
In Muidumbe, Ms Jasinto and her husband had grown maize and cassava, earning just enough to send their children to the local school. Life wasn’t easy, but it was peaceful.
A few weeks before the attack, Ms Jasinto and her neighbours had been warned by their chief about the presence of Islamist extremists in the surrounding villages and further north.
But no one expected to be hit so soon. Why would someone attack our village, Ms Jasinto remembered thinking at the time – a place with virtually no assets save for a few carefully saved bags of cereals and grain?
Pemba was far too expensive for the Jasintos to stay and, within a few weeks, they relocated to Naminawe, one of the six resettlement camps in Metuge Province. There, she sat her children down, telling them that they had no option but to deal with the untold horrors that they had witnessed. The family have now been here for seven years in what feels like permanent limbo.
“Gas is what made us leave our home,” says Jasinto, her voice cracking. “I’ve left my thoughts, my house.” She misses the fresh fountains back in Muidumbe – here, water points are salty, and a long walk away.
“The oil and gas in Cabo Delgado, people are killing each other for it, because of it.”
Cabo Delgado has an abundunce of natural resources Credit: Kang-Chun Cheng
Cabo Delgado is endowed with a glut of natural resources including some of the world’s biggest ruby deposits, graphite mines that have caught Tesla’s attention, and 125 trillion cubic feet of natural gas – the largest reserves anywhere on the African continent.
Yet the World Bank estimates that 95 per cent of residents in rural Mozambique live in poverty. Most people live without electricity or running water, and few own mobile phones. It’s the result of past colonial conflicts, plus decades of corruption and the government’s refusal to adopt a cohesive development strategy.
In October 2017, an armed group called Ansar al-Sunna, also known as Al-Shabaab (though it bears no relation to the Somali jihadist group of the same name), emerged in northern Mozambique.
Now called Islamic State Mozambique (ISM), its roots stem from East African Salafi-jihadist networks that began to infiltrate Cabo Delgado as early as 2007. Its main leaders, Tanzanian Abu Yassir Hassan and Muamudo Saha, were radical, young Salafists – puritanical Islamists who promote a rigid interpretation of the Quran.
ISM quickly became known for its cold-blooded use of violence, carrying out numerous massacres targeting civilians, many of them the same destitute farmers and fishers it claims to be fighting for.
Hardened ISIS fighters arrived in 2018 to support the group’s effort to establish a caliphate in Cabo Delgado, according to the African Union. And by late 2019, the Islamic State’s Somalian splinter group was providing tactical training and channelling funds to Mozambique. Thanks to this support, ISM seized the cities of Mocimboa da Praia and Palma, targeting urban centres across five northern districts, and driving out the army.
The insurgency received global attention in March 2021 after its attack on Palma, the site of the $20 billion liquified natural gas (LNG) project by TotalEnergies, ENI, and Exxon. There were at least 1,402 victims, including 1,193 killed or missing, and 209 kidnapped. In the aftermath, Total halted the project, invoking force majeure, and despite periodic statements about resuming operations in early 2024, it remains stalled.
Targeting impoverished regions is a well-documented strategy of religious extremists Credit: Kang-Chun Cheng
The way the Mozambican government handled the vast LNG projects in Cabo Delgado – with its nebulous contracts and lack of community engagement – added fuel to an already volatile situation.
For example, TotalEnergies’ construction of the Afungi onshore LNG (liquified natural gas) park – an 18,000-hectare site twice the size of Paris – forced 557 families into resettlement camps. Crucially, the camps were not only a fraction of the size of displaced civilians’ land, but were situated inland, sealing off access to coasts and croplands.
Daniel Ribeiro, technical coordinator and founding member of Justica Ambiental, the Mozambican chapter of Friends of the Earth, says that more than 80 per cent of Cabo Delgado residents are subsistence fishers or farmers.
“Access to the sea, to land, is essential to livelihoods,” he tells the Telegraph over an encrypted call. “Any disruptions will cause major social issues. Palma’s gas project, amongst others, led to rampant land grabbing.”
The hasty withdrawal of TotalEnergies after the Palma attack then meant they failed to deliver promised compensation to half of the displaced families.
“Cabo Delgado is a socially volatile situation,” Mr Ribeiro explains. “The biggest investment in Africa is generating billions for foreigners, but none for the people – of course, this will feed instability.”
The government repeatedly rebuffed opportunities to focus on the needs of their people and prioritised short-term gains, says Mr Ribeiro.
“They chose to militarise the situation. In the post 9/11 world, it’s very easy to get sympathy and support for ‘extremism’ from Western countries, who have a very embedded narrative of terrorism in East Africa.”
Miners and mercenaries
Targeting impoverished regions is a well-documented strategy of religious extremists, and research has found that those experiencing extreme poverty are more susceptible to radicalisation.According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, LNG fails to offer a reliable route to economic development. Huge financial risks are likely to become a liability for the already destitute Mozambican government, while poorly managed community resettlement to develop LNG sites damages natural ecosystems and stifles tourism.
“The government has a bad track record of managing revenues from such projects,” says Tomas Queface, a security consultant at ACLED. “It never translates into wealth for the well-being of the population.”
Mr Queface believes it is the government’s responsibility to negotiate reasonable contracts that benefit the nation, not just foreign investors. “Total is a company, they’re going to want to make money. What we lack now is a proper strategy on how to use this money,” he says.
Filipe Nyusi, the Mozambican President, has refused to acknowledge the socioeconomic drivers of the conflict in Cabo Delgado and has instead doubled down on the extremism narrative.
Mr Nyusi has remained committed to countering the insurgency with force, even though it quickly became clear that the Mozambican army is no match for the highly capable insurgents.
“The army is using either Cold War equipment, or what they can manage to get from the Russians and Chinese,” says Peter Bofin, a senior research coordinator at The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED).
