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Africa Subsaharan

Islamist insurgency in Mozambique escalates attacks, beheadings reported

2020-02-09

[Jpost] People are fleeing a surge of attacks in northern Mozambique where witnesses have described beheadings, mass kidnappings and villages burned to the ground, the United Nations
...an organization conceived in the belief that we're just one big happy world, with the sort of results you'd expect from such nonsense...
said on Friday.

Officials said gangs had stepped up assaults in Cabo Delgado province, the center of an Islamist insurgency that has killed hundreds since it started in 2017.

The northern region is also home to one of the world's biggest recent gas finds, where Exxon Mobil Corp, Total and others are working.

Displaced villagers have described killings, maiming, torture and destroyed crops, Andrej Mahecic, the front man for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said.

"They speak of men in particular being targeted and beheaded, and many, many reports of women and kiddies ... being kidnapped or simply disappearing," he told a briefing in Geneva.

Some of the attackers appeared to be bandidos. "But there is also the element of some of the groups being driven by ideological or other ideas. And they have been quite vicious ... in spreading the terror in this part of Mozambique," Mahecic added.

The UNHCR said there had been a sharp increase in violence in recent months, and the past weeks had been the most turbulent period since attacks began in October 2017. In all, 100,000 people have been uprooted by the violence in the last two years.

"In total, at least 28 attacks were carried out in the province since the beginning of the year," Mahecic said.

The forces of Evil - who tout their brand of Islam as an antidote to what they describe as a corrupt ruling elite - called themselves Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jama when they started launching attacks in 2017.

...Ansar al-Sunna (Supporters of the tradition), known formally as “Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jamo" (adepts of the prophetic tradition) and informally by the locals as Al Shabaab. Appearing in Mozambique in 2015, this particular Ansar al Sunna were originally followers of the radical Kenyan cleric Aboud Rogo, who was killed in 2012. They seem to be your standard takfiris, happily enforcing their Salafist rules on the surrounding populace. Apparently they hired members of Somali Al Shabaab to train them in jihading, then split into various cells. Ansar al-Sunna funds itself through heroin, contraband and the ivory trade.

More recently, 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....
has grabbed credit via its media outlets, though there has been no independent confirmation of a link.

Posted by:trailing wife

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