Abstract
Since 2017, growing insurgency in the northern parts of Mozambique has attracted the attention of observers and conflict analysts internationally. Twenty-five years after the conclusion of the brutal Mozambican Civil War (1975–1992), the insurgent movement Ansar al-Sunna (also known as Ahlu Sunna wa Jama) started to cause havoc in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, which is a stronghold of the ruling party, Frelimo, but also an impoverished and predominantly Muslim area. This happened after a group of radicalised young men from the areas of Cabo Delgado gathered in opposition to the local Sufi Islam and the Salafi National Islamic Council in the country. Two issues in particular played a role in the radicalisation of the young men, namely exposure to international and regional jihadist networks, particularly those in Somalia, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and local grievances and experiences of historical marginalisation. What should be noted here is that the insurgency in Cabo Delgado is the first manifestation of violent extremism of this kind in Southern Africa, namely an extremist and militant movement that is associated with the Islamic State (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) (ISIS), and thus with the notion of a jihadist insurgency.
Ansar al-Sunna, which is often locally referred to as the al-Shabaab of Cabo Delgado, initially challenged local imams and defaced mosques, but eventually started to organise militarily by establishing military camps. They burst on the scene in October 2017, when they launched an attack against three police stations in Mocímboa da Praia, a port town in northern Mozambique. Since 2018, attacks have become increasingly violent and characterised by bloodshed, involving beheadings, attacks on villages, and kidnapping of women and girls. An attack on a convoy transporting goods and workers for Anadarko, a now defunct United States multinational oil and gas company which operated in Mozambique, also occurred, resulting in a temporary suspension of construction work on the company’s natural gas plant in Cabo Delgado. After a period of calm, Mocímboa da Praia was again attacked in April 2020, but this time Ansar al-Sunna made it clear that the movement had come to stay and that they envisioned the establishment of a Sharia-based administration in the Cabo Delgado region. The attack on Mocímboa da Praia was especially of political significance as it represented a most important military victory over the Mozambican armed forces in the northern parts.
Violent attacks on civilians played out in a landscape of increasingly high levels of insecurity and displacement among the local communities with very negative consequences for development within the region and a disruption of farming activities. This was followed by a heavy-handed response to the insurgents from the Mozambican security forces, which was similar to harsh security responses elsewhere on the African continent, specifically Somalia, the Lake Chad Basin, the Sahel and the Maghreb. In Mozambique the escalating attacks and harsh security response have heightened distrust among local residents and led residents to take to the streets in the city of Palma in Cabo Delgado. All of this occurred against the backdrop of growing foreign economic engagement in the Cabo Delgado region by gigantic multinational oil and gas companies relating to the discovery of natural gas reserves in the offshore waters of the province.
The Mozambican security forces proved themselves too weak to counter the extremists and could not prevent them from taking the strategic northern town of Mocímboa de Praia. Given the glaring operational weaknesses of the Mozambican security forces, the Mozambican government increasingly relied on foreign paramilitary contractors to put a lid on the insurgency – first the Russian Wagner Group and thereafter the South African-based Dyck Advisory Group. The interventions and operations of paramilitary groups in support of the Mozambican security forces did not, however, stop attacks by Ansar al-Sunna in Cabo Delgado. In fact, in November 2020 many locals were reportedly beheaded by the insurgents in the north-eastern parts, which led the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, to appeal for urgent measures to protect civilians in what observers described as an increasingly dangerous and chaotic situation. Hence appeals were made by various actors for an intervention operation by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), specifically the deployment of a multinational military force.
In June 2021 the SADC agreed to deploy a regional standby force in Cabo Delgado. The agreement was implemented soon thereafter when the SADC deployed a regional standby force – the first time the organisation had done so – as the security landscape in Cabo Delgado demanded a counter-insurgency operation as opposed to a peacekeeping operation. However, as much as the multinational agreement on SADC intervention drew a positive response from many observers, it soon transpired that the multinational agreement reached in June of that year between the SADC and the Mozambican government was hampered by some member states lagging on troop and equipment commitments – with very negative consequences for the counter-insurgency operations in Cabo Delgado. Meanwhile, another important agreement was concluded, namely a bilateral agreement between the governments of Mozambique and Rwanda, providing for the deployment of Rwandan troops to Cabo Delgado. All in all, the foreign forces, working with the Mozambican security forces, soon managed to drive insurgents out of some of their strongholds while a substantial number were killed. Yet, on the downside, several small groups kept mounting attacks in parts of Cabo Delgado from January 2022, especially in the upper north-western parts of the country. This specifically includes the neighbouring Niassa province to the west of Cabo Delgado and even parts of Tanzania. Moreover, from a counter-insurgency point of view, many observers rightly maintain that the conflict was generated by local grievances and socio-economic marginalisation, and in this regard they correctly keep pointing out that the conflict will persist if counter-insurgency operations do not go beyond a military approach to quell the insurgency – an argument that is strongly supported in this article.
In view of the above, this article concentrates on the insurgency and conflict dynamics in northern Mozambique, as well as the political and military measures taken to counter the insurgency. The scope of this article is as follows: First, insurgency as a concept and the theoretical underpinnings of counterinsurgency operations are examined. Secondly, the discussion focuses on those factors that motivated the jihadist insurgency of Ansar al-Sunna in Cabo Delgado and continue to fuel the conflict dynamics. Thirdly, the discussion focuses on the steps taken by the government of Mozambique to quell the insurgency, most specifically the contracting of foreign paramilitary role players to assist the Mozambican government. Fourthly, the article analyses the counterinsurgency roles of the SADC and the Rwandan government at a regional intergovernmental level in the conflict dynamics. The analysis is qualitative and thus based on the collecting and analysing of non-numerical data from all relevant and available sources. This being said, the aim of the study is to assess and determine whether meaningful progress has been made in efforts to deal with Ansar al-Sunna as a jihadist movement in the conflict dynamics in northern Mozambique, and accordingly whether the conducting of counterinsurgency operations in Cabo Delgado is showing evidence of success.
Keywords: Ansar al-Sunna; Cabo Delgado; counter-insurgency operations; extremism; Mozambique; SADC
- The featured image by MustangJoe with this article is available on Pixabay.