Experts on the seven-year war in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province have illuminated the workings of jihadist group Al-Shabab, with sociologist João Feijó describing the local insurgent group as a “franchise” of the global Islamic State (IS) “brand”.
“Al-Shabab has autonomy to act but uses the IS brand to get the discipline, ideology and techniques for recruitment, training, indoctrination and artisanal explosives,” said Feijó. “But the majority of weapons don’t come from abroad. They are stolen in attacks on the Mozambican defence and security forces.” To illustrate this, Feijó described how Al-Shabab looted military vehicles and weapons during a raid on the coastal town of Mocímboa da Praia, then used this equipment to attack TotalEnergies’ liquefied natural gas project in Palma in March 2021, killing hundreds of locals and dozens of Total contractors.
Feijó was speaking in Cape Town recently at the launch of God, Grievance and Greed: War in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, a special edition of the journal Kronos published by the department of historical studies and the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and edited by Liazzat Bonate, Paolo Israel and Carmeliza Rosário.
Feijó and historian Bonate, both Mozambican academics, interviewed more than 100 people from the war-torn province to piece together the unfolding violence as well as the tactics and structure of Al-Shabab. Israel, an anthropologist and historian at UWC, scoured and interpreted the tide of social media produced and distributed by locals trying to make sense of events and look for missing family members. He also interviewed artists and musicians.
At the book launch, Feijó lifted the lid on aspects of the internal organisation of Al-Shabab. “They have reinvented what they call a government and answer to it in a centralised way. They have generators in the bush, at least they did in 2020 and 2021. They had computers. They have tried to recreate an administration system with a civil wing and an armed wing.”
This civil wing includes many divisions such as a health service staffed by nurses who were either kidnapped or joined voluntarily, Islamic courts, and logistics to oversee mechanics and drivers. On the military side, strategies include provoking terror through beheading and abduction as well as training child soldiers, which can involve requiring them to kill a friend. In what Feijó termed a “Jekyll and Hyde” approach, Al-Shabab also generates loyalty by distributing food after looting, providing food and medicine to recently kidnapped people, and cooking for the elderly and sick.
People joined Al-Shabab for various reasons, he said, from kidnapped child soldiers to people driven by religious or political beliefs and others simply seeking jobs and food. Many female insurgents are part of Al-Shabab. Those at the top of the hierarchy joined either voluntarily or through marriage to high-ranking insurgents. These women enjoy benefits such as “slaves” and holidays at Mocímboa da Praia on the coast.
In contrast to this complex organisational structure, journalists and the Mozambican government described Al-Shabab as “terrorists in the bush”, said Feijó. The government maintained that “they have no face and we do not know what they want and there is no way of communicating with them”.
In reality, there was no political will on the part of the government to negotiate, said Feijó. “The Mozambican defence and security forces also provoke terror,” he said, referring to an article by Alex Perry published recently in Politico alleging atrocities perpetrated against civilians by soldiers based at TotalEnergies’ natural gas plant on the Afungi peninsula. Other military forces in Cabo Delgado have included mercenary groups and local militias as well as Southern African Development Community (Sadc) and Rwandan soldiers.
“Social media and songs show how the civilian population is caught between the hammer and the anvil,” said Israel. “There is a song by women of the coastal region of Quissanga who say, ‘we run from the mashababe [Al-Shabab] here and we find the government soldiers there. And they both torture us.’” Israel added that Al-Shabab itself was “split into multiple currents”.
A critical element of the Cabo Delgado conflict is what Bonate calls the “glocal” (global-local) dimension in which jihadi insurgencies with their global ideology exploit existing local grievances against the state. Two schisms in Cabo Delgado form part of that local dimension.
In the first, young Muslims radicalised by the sermons of Kenyan Aboud Rogo Mohammed were ostracised after they entered mosques “armed with knives and machetes, and wearing shoes and shortened trousers”, the attire of jihadists from the time of the Prophet Mohammed. These youth (Al-Shabab means “young people”) were denounced by the Salafi and Sufi establishment and imprisoned en masse by the Mozambican authorities. “Hotheaded youngsters” stormed prisons in Mocímboa da Praia in October 2017 to free those incarcerated. “From there, things escalated into a war and in 2019 the youth sought to join IS,” said Bonate.
Israel outlined the second schism, that between Al-Shabab and pro-Frelimo Christians living in “the heartland of the liberation struggle” in the isolated highlands of Cabo Delgado. “Because of the relationship of these Makonde people to the struggle, they have benefited from war pensions and look down on the coastal people who support Al-Shabab. The [former] president, Filipe Nyusi, comes from this area. So there is an ethno-religious-political tension between these two groups,” said Israel. This tension culminated in April 2020, when the jihadists attacked the Makonde villages on the plateau.
This fracture was illustrated by a harrowing 12-minute voice note that Israel believes is a call from a relative looking for a missing family member. An insurgent answers the phone: “The owner of the phone. I slit his throat. Me, I am an Al-Shababe.” The insurgent argues that killing Makonde people is justified because they put Nyusi in power and are therefore responsible for injustice in the country. When the caller challenges the insurgent about the levels of jihadist violence, he responds by drawing a parallel with past conflicts: “Beginning with the colonial war. You did it, you wiped out [people].”
An incendiary third local element of the “glocal” mix is the discovery of natural gas at Palma. Bonate said this led to “corruption, land-grabbing and jobs for vientes (outsiders) to the exclusion of locals. The gas industry made a lot of promises and none was fulfilled because local communities didn’t have the skills, training or schooling. There was complete corruption and people rushed from Maputo for jobs, even as cleaners and drivers, while local people were not employed.”
Feijó said land grabbing was mostly linked to the Mozambican government. “Total paid good compensation. But former freedom fighters, many of them Christian and Makonde, realised that a lot of land was going to have value. With the argument that in Mozambique the land belongs to the state, they got land for free without paying compensation to the local population.
“I’ve asked myself many times, is this the third war [after the war for independence and the civil war] or the continuation of the same war?” said Feijó.
Since 1964, Cabo Delgado’s political economy has been driven by extractive industries, exploiting cheap labour and resources for the global market. “It’s gas now but next it will be graphite for solar panels and batteries. There is the Maputo corridor serving the industry of SA, the Beira corridor serving Zimbabwe and the Nacala corridor serving Malawi. And now you have the Pemba corridor to Niassa. All these investments do not create jobs.”
The conflicts, often labelled with ideological and now religious tags, are rooted in the region’s political economy and structural inequalities. “I think this is the main issue that forces so many young people to get a weapon and go to the bush generation after generation.”
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