Hundreds of thousands flee IS as Mozambique struggles to quell conflict

More than 300,000 people have been displaced by an Islamic State insurgency in Mozambique since July, amid growing fears that authorities in the southern African nation lack a workable plan to end the fighting.

- Rachel Savage Johannesburg Carmen Aguilar García

A internally displaced Mozambican woman and child receive food from the World Food Programme in Cabo Delgado province.

(Rachel Goger/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

With other wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan attracting more attention, and a fall in foreign aid, the grinding conflict has been largely ignored or forgotten. More than a million people have been displaced, many of them two, three or even four times over.

Neither the Mozambican army nor a Rwandan intervention have managed to quell the insurgency, which has ravaged northern Mozambique since October 2017, when insurgents from Islamic State-Mozambique, an affiliate of the main IS group in the Middle East, carried out their first attacks, in Mocimboa da Praia in Cabo Delgado in the northeast.

The group attracted worldwide attention with an attack in March 2021 on the town of Pemba. At least 87 people were killed, according to the International Institute of Security Studies, a British thinktank, including foreigners working on a multibillion-dollar Total liquified natural gas (LNG) project.

Rwanda, whose military is better equipped and trained than Mozambique's, sent 1,000 troops to Cabo Delgado in July 2021. This initially helped to peg back the militants. Rwanda now has an estimated 4,000-5,000 soldiers deployed.