[DW] In just three years, an Islamist insurgency in northern Mozambique has killed an estimated 2,600 people. Last week's attack on the town of Palma, which lasted days, should concern neighboring countries, experts say.
On October 5, 2017, gunnies carried out a pre-dawn attack on three cop shoppes in Mocímboa da Praia, a district in Mozambique's northern province of Cabo Delgado. The attackers killed 17 people and made away with guns and ammunition. They reportedly told the villagers that they don't believe in Western education and would not pay taxes.
Since that first ambush, the attacks have spread to several districts in the region and have become more frequent. The attack last Wednesday claimed dozens of lives and lasted several days. Three years later, the mystery surrounding the identity and motivation of this group persists. Locally, they are known as al-Shabaab
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...... the personification of Somali state failure...
(the youth), but the group has no known connection to Somalia's jihadi group with a similar name.
According to Sergio Inacio Chichava, a senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Studies (IESE) in Mozambique, the country's authorities must be aware of who these attackers are by now. "The government has enough intelligence to say who the group that is attacking Cabo Delgado is and what their intentions are," Chichava said.
"This group has never hidden, from the beginning, that it intends to impose Sharia," Chichava told DW.
WHO ARE MOZAMBIQUE'S ISLAMIST INSURGENTS?
"That is the million-dollar question," Adriano Nuvunga, executive director of the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) in Mozambique, said. "Everyone has been asking for the past three years who these people are. There is an understanding that local grievances drive this conflict, and it might have been hijacked by international terrorist dynamics," Nuvunga told DW.
Nuvunga, a human rights
When they're defined by the state or an NGO they don't mean much...
activist, blamed marginalization and extraction of natural resources by the elites without local development as a critical source of the conflict. French energy giant Total has invested $20 billion (€16.9 billion) in extracting liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Cabo Delgado. A network of illicit economic activities, including drug trafficking, brutality and violation of human rights by different interests of politically exposed people might also have contributed.
There was talk of radical Islamist groups in Mozambique as early as 2016, Chichava said. However,
some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them...
some experts believe they had started mobilization a decade earlier.
Around 2007, local Moslem leaders said they had noticed a "change" in the behavior of some Moslem youth. The group started practicing a different form of Islam, drinking alcohol and entering the mosque with shoes. Later, the disenfranchised young men formed a group called Ansar al-Sunna and quickly adopted a stricter version of Islam.
According to military intelligence sources on the ground, the group currently has about 4,500 members, 2,000 of whom carry arms, AFP reported. It is also believed that imported muscle from Tanzania and Somalia are part of the group, but their role is unclear.
After the October 5, 2017 attack, the group released a video stating their intention of turning the gas-rich Cabo Delgado region into a caliphate.
Mozambique plans to start exporting natural gas from Cabo Delgado as early as 2022. But the growing military presence of murderous Moslems poses a severe threat to megaprojects. The violence has claimed the lives of at least 2,600 people, half of them civilians, according to the US-based data-collecting agency Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED). More than 700,000 have fled their homes.
GOVERNMENT'S CONFUSING EXPLANATIONS
Maputo has sought to explain the identity and objectives of the brutal attackers by issuing four different hypotheses. At first, the government admitted that the "insurgents" were individuals aiming to install a state based on Islamic law and principles. In 2019, the main Ansar al-Sunna murderous Moslem group declared their allegiance to the so-called Islamic State
 ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
(IS).
Authorities then changed their story and pointed the finger at former miners from Montepuz who were allegedly being manipulated by foreigners from Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
 ...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo aka Republic of Congo , which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material...
. The authorities reportedly expelled the foreigners from the mines for conducting illicit operations. Another explanation given was that a group of Mozambican businessmen in Beira had financed the murderous Moslems because they were unhappy with the government's fight against the illegal timber trade. Lastly, they said this was a "war waged by external forces in collusion with some Mozambicans."
THREAT TO NEIGHBORING COUNTRIES
Mozambique's violence has caused jitters in neighboring Tanzania, South Africa, and Zim-bob-we. "There is already some overspill into Tanzania," Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at Chatham House, said.
Earlier this month, the United States designated the Ansar al-Sunna group, which it dubbed "ISIS Mozambique," as a foreign terrorist organization. The US named Abu Yasir Hassan — a Tanzanian national — as leader of the group, which is also known as Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jama. The US this month started training Mozambican forces in counterinsurgency operations.
"It is important to remember that although this is a Mozambican problem at the core, it is also a regional issue," Vines said, adding that coordination and cooperation between Mozambique and Tanzania on this particular issue had improved. 
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