Insurgents in Mozambique have abducted hundreds of women and girls, forcing many into sexual relations with fighters and possibly trafficking others elsewhere in Africa, interviews with some who have escaped the extremists reveal.
Most of the abducted women are under 18, with the youngest about 12 years old. They are being held in a series of camps and bases across insurgent-controlled territory in north-eastern Mozambique.
Many are chosen by young fighters as “wives” and forced into sexual relations. Conditions are extremely harsh, with limited medical care, long marches under guard, unreliable food supplies and a constant risk of attacks by government forces or mercenaries.
The mass abductions recall that of more than 200 female students from a school in the town of Chibok in Nigeria in 2014 by the Boko Haram group. Media attention, a Twitter campaign and interventions by celebrities led to the US and other western powers committing soldiers, intelligence specialists and substantial funds to the effort to rescue the young women.
The insurgency in Mozambique’s far north, which started four years ago, has killed thousands and displaced almost half a million people.
The interviews, conducted with 23 women last year by researchers from the Observatório do Meio Rural (Rural Environment Observatory), a Mozambique-based thinktank, offer an unprecedented glimpse inside an opaque and little-known group….
João Feijó, author of a report based on the interviews, said that he believed more than 1,000 girls and young women had been abducted.
“These kinds of numbers would be a major logistic problem for the insurgents, and I believe that some girls have been trafficked. We have reports of women being selected to study English in neighbouring Tanzania, which sounds like a euphemism for being trafficked,” Feijó said.
“This report tell the story of those who ran away but doesn’t tell the story of those who are still there or who have been trafficked. Their voices are silent.”
The interviews reveal how only “young and attractive girls” are targeted by the insurgents. Those selected are known as “noodles”, a rare food seen as desirable, in contrast to “sorghum”, a staple, the women told researchers.
“Adolescent girls are the most favourite victims; other ages are spared,” one interviewee said.
In an attack last year on Mocímboa da Praia, a small coastal town still in the hands of insurgents, more than 300 women and girls were forced into trucks at gunpoint or marched from their homes.
One interviewee said that some people lost three to four children in the attack as the insurgents went “from house to house and captured the girls and took them away”.
Captive women are forced to attend “education” sessions of Qur’anic instruction and ideological lectures, according to the interviewees.
“They are given food, clothes and efforts are made to integrate them as ‘wives’. But this is not a choice. They are in a scenario of great violence and need food and security,” Feijó said….
