Children as young as eleven have been beheaded by militant Islamists in northeastern Mozambique, according to a report from Save the Children.
The jihadist uprising in northeastern Mozambique has claimed at least 2,600 lives and forced 670,000 to flee. Children under the age of eleven are beheaded. Here, refugees receive help from a health worker from MSF. Photo: MSF / AP / NTB
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17. mars 2021 07:08
Last updated just now
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The jihadist uprising in Mozambique has so far claimed around 2,600 lives, half of them civilians, and at least 670,000 people have been forced to flee their homes.
Save the Children has talked to victims, among them the mother of a twelve-year-old boy who was beheaded by jihadists while she and the three other children were hiding.
– Our village was attacked, and the houses were burned down that night, she says.
– We tried to escape into the woods, but they took my eldest son and beheaded him. We could not do anything, because then we would also have been killed, the woman says.
Not safe
Another woman says that her eleven-year-old son suffered the same fate and that she has still not been able to bury him.
– After my eleven-year-old son was killed, we understood that it was no longer safe in the village. We fled to my father’s house in another village, but a few days later they started attacking it as well, she says.
The jihadists now control long stretches of coast, including the strategically important port city of Mocimboa da Praia, and they are moving further and further inland. Their goal is to create a so-called caliphate in the oil-rich province of Cabo Delgado.
Shocked
Save the Children’s country director in Mozambique, Chance Briggs, is shocked by the reports of child killings and asks the outside world to come to the victims’ rescue.
“The needs of the children and their families who have been driven to flee in Cabo Delgado are far greater than the resources available to help them,” Briggs said.
“Almost 1 million people are threatened by hunger as a direct result of this conflict, including those who have been forced to flee and the inhabitants of the areas to which they have fled,” he said.
The crisis in northeastern Mozambique was further exacerbated when the area was hit by cyclone Kenneth in 2019 and severe flooding last year.
Sworn allegiance to IS
The jihadists in Mozambique go by the name al-Shabaab, but have no direct affiliation with the group of the same name in Somalia.
The uprising began in 2017, and two years later the jihadists swore allegiance to the extremist Islamist group IS.
In November last year, they launched a major offensive and attacked and looted a number of villages. Residential buildings and public buildings were burned down, and many civilians were killed.
In December, at least 20 boys and young men were beheaded in an attack in the Muidumbe district, and 25 government soldiers were killed in an ambush in the same area a few days later.
War crimes
In early March, Amnesty International released a report accusing Cabo Delgado of government forces and pro-government militias of “arbitrary killings of hundreds of civilians.”
The report also accuses a South African mercenary company, which assists government forces with helicopter support, of complicity in war crimes.
The government army in Mozambique rejects Amnesty’s accusations and calls them “untrue”.
Last week, US President Joe Biden branded the jihadists in Mozambique a terrorist organization and has sent military advisers to assist and train the country’s government forces. The former colonial power Portugal has promised to do the same.
The French oil company Total has invested large sums in the extraction of natural gas in Cabo Delgado, but earlier this year evacuated several thousand employees as a result of the safety situation.
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