Cabo Ligado Monthly: August 2020
August at a Glance
Vital Stats
ACLED recorded 36 organized political violence events in August 2020, resulting in 202 fatalities
Nearly half of the recorded fatalities came from two events: the 10 August battle at Awasse, Mocimboa da Praia district in which insurgents killed 55 Mozambican troops in an ambush, and the 13 August incident off the coast of Nkomangano, Mocimboa da Praia district, in which government security forces attacked two boats full of displaced people, killing 40
Events took place in Ancuabe, Macomia, Mocimboa da Praia, Muidumbe, Palma, Pemba, and Quissanga districts, but the vast majority of action happened in Mocimboa da Praia district
Vital Trends
Government violence against civilians, measured by fatalities, outstripped insurgent violence against civilians in August
Events were geographically much more centered in August, with the battle for Mocimboa da Praia, precursor attacks by insurgents, and subsequent raids and clashes in the vicinity of Mocimboa da Praia town making up the lion’s share of the month’s action
Areas of Quissanga district and western Macomia district that had been relatively quiet in July remained so in August
In This Report
Analysis of the insurgent occupation of Mocimboa da Praia town
A historical look at civilian support for insurgency in Cabo Delgado
An evaluation of prospects for regional involvement in Cabo Delgado following the August SADC summit
August Situation Summary
The most significant development of August 2020 in the Cabo Delgado conflict was the fall of the Mozambican government garrison defending Mocimboa da Praia town to a determined insurgent assault. A detailed analysis of the battle for Mocimboa da Praia, the insurgents’ subsequent occupation of the town, and its ramifications for the future of the conflict can be found in the next section of this report. The district was the epicenter of the month’s fighting. There were 25 organized political violence events in Mocimboa da Praia district in August, resulting in 162 fatalities. Other events, which took place in Ancuabe, Macomia, Muidumbe, Palma, Pemba, and Quissanga districts, resulted in 40 fatalities combined.
Many of the events in Mocimboa da Praia district took place after the town fell. Insurgents consolidated their hold over the surrounding area in a series of raids, and began attacking islands off the district coast where civilians displaced by the fighting were living. Displaced civilians were also targeted by government forces as they tried to escape Mocimboa da Praia, leading to a tragic incident in which soldiers opened fire on two ships full of displaced people seeking safety on the island of Nhonge. Forty civilians died.
By the end of the month, the government had begun to gather its resources for a counterattack to retake Mocimboa da Praia. At the time of publication that counterattack has not begun in earnest. There have, however, been significant buildups of government troops in Palma and Mueda districts.
In the south of the conflict zone, Quissanga district remained calm. The only event ACLED recorded in the district was on 5 August, when government troops killed 12 insurgents in a battle near the district capital. By the middle of the month, people who had been displaced by earlier fighting in Quissanga reported being able to return to their homes and fields, at least in the western part of the district. Quissanga town remains largely empty, but it is not the site of frequent violence that it once was.
The Mozambican government also unveiled the Integrated Northern Development Agency (ADIN), the government agency which will coordinate humanitarian relief and development efforts in Mozambique’s northern provinces. The agency debuted with less funding than it was promised, but with a great deal of international support and the backing of its boss, Celso Correia, Mozambique’s Agriculture Minister and a close confidante of President Filipe Nyusi.
The Occupation of Mocimboa da Praia
The occupation of Mocimboa da Praia by insurgents on 12 August captured the world’s attention, largely as a result of the town’s proximity to liquified natural gas infrastructure on the Afungi peninsula. However, the occupation, and the battles that preceded it, are more important as a measure of the insurgency’s growing strategic competence and reveal its intentions in the near term. The insurgent victory at Mocimboa da Praia marked an inflection point in the conflict, with insurgents showing their ability to unseat an entrenched government force and their ambition to occupy one of Cabo Delgado’s most important coastal towns for an extended period.
The most notable feature of the battle for Mocimboa da Praia was the level of coordination shown by the insurgency over a long period of time. Early in the conflict, insurgent attacks largely took place in isolation from one another, with little organizing logic guiding what was attacked and when, beyond the availability of targets. The Mocimboa da Praia attack, however, shows how far the insurgents have come in their strategic-level execution. The fall of Mocimboa da Praia was preceded by a week of attacks on key routes to the town and important outlying neighborhoods, all leading toward the final assault on the town’s port district. Likewise, attacks dating back to 28 July helped insurgents clear areas around the town’s access routes, setting the stage for the eventual occupation.
Coordinating attacks over time requires the capacity to make complicated plans, the ability to disseminate those plans to various units, and the command structure to ensure that those plans are followed. There are also intelligence and logistical prerequisites for putting the plans into action. Insurgents had shown flashes of those capabilities before in earlier attacks on district capitals, but the latest attack on Mocimboa da Praia shows that they are putting all the components together in ways they were not able to a year ago. The increase in sophistication may be a result of hard-won experience and improved resources following battlefield successes. It may also indicate the arrival of more experienced foreign fighters on the scene. While there is no evidence of fighters in Cabo Delgado from outside East and Central Africa, experienced militants from, for example, Democratic Republic of Congo could have augmented the expertise available to Cabo Delgado insurgents.
The Mocimboa da Praia battle was also notable for the length of the insurgents’ ongoing occupation. Mocimboa da Praia is not the first district capital that insurgents have held for an extended period — they held Quissanga town for over a month earlier in the year — but the group’s commitment to holding a town that the government is keen to recover speaks to some of the local dynamics at play in the conflict. To the extent that the insurgency is interested in making short-term progress on its stated goal of offering an alternative form of governance for Cabo Delgado civilians, being able to maintain a presence in a major town allows insurgents to show how their form of governance might function.
Mocimboa da Praia seems to be part of the insurgents’ preferred base area — a location with infrastructure where they can begin to experiment with what their governance approach might be. From an Islamic State (IS) perspective, this base area might be seen as a caliphate. However, given that there is no indication of a transfer of governance expertise from IS in the Middle East to Mozambique, it is better to think of the ambition to remain in Mocimboa da Praia as an expression of the insurgency’s local goals. Still, the insurgents are unlikely to be able to withstand a major counterattack by government forces, and will likely retreat in the face of such a counterattack to fight another day.
Looking to the future, even if the insurgents’ occupation of Mocimboa da Praia comes to an end in the coming weeks, its effect on the conflict will live on. Defeating an entrenched government force is a signal of the insurgency’s strength that is sure to be noted by potential insurgent allies both inside and outside Mozambique. The shocking behavior of government troops when they last occupied the town, and the work insurgents have done to extend their control into areas just to the north and south of Mocimboa da Praia, are also of note to local audiences. These factors, alongside the insurgent’s victory over government forces, will doubtlessly improve local insurgent recruitment. Press coverage of the occupation, both from independent media and from the in-house IS publicity apparatus, may persuade fence-sitters outside Cabo Delgado who are inclined to be sympathetic to the insurgency that outright support for the group is worth the risk.
The government’s approach to organizing its counterattack has done little to quell the insurgents’ public relations victory. After Mocimboa da Praia fell, the government’s first move was to deploy troops to Palma in a transparent attempt to defend the liquified natural gas project infrastructure at Afungi. In doing so, the government demonstrated its prioritization of foreign gas companies over local security which IS has used as a major component of its propaganda. Though the government’s move to retake Mocimboa da Praia is likely to be militarily successful, it will do little to undo the damage to the government’s reputation caused by both the loss of the town and its actions in the days following their withdrawal.
Civilian Support for the Insurgency
Understanding civilian support for any insurgency is challenging. Civilians in war are often thought of by policymakers as the sum of their easily-measured identities — religion, ethnicity, gender — rather than as actors pursuing their interests and political beliefs, which tend to be more variable and harder to measure than identities. Yet, what we know about civil wars is that rather than their identity, people’s politics and the extent to which they live under the control of one or another armed group are much more likely to predict their allegiance at any given time. Allegiances are often as malleable as military conditions. To understand civilian support for the insurgency in Cabo Delgado, therefore, it is important to take stock of what we know about how sensitive Cabo Delgado civilians are to shifts in politics and the balance of power in their communities and region.
The first thing to understand about coastal Cabo Delgado civilians’ experience with insurgency is that it is long, and that there is a strong local tradition of anti-state resistance. The Mozambican independence struggle began in Macomia district in 1964, and many locals either joined the FRELIMO cause or provided support as civilians. Despite FRELIMO’s leftist, anti-religious bent, many Cabo Delgado Muslims supported the young party in its fight against Portugal. Muslim veterans of the liberation war from Cabo Delgado, when recounting the reasons why they joined FRELIMO, almost universally describe repression by the Portuguese state as their main justification for supporting the independence effort. Arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and execution of family members were among the top complaints.
Muslim support for independence was often organized through religious channels. One early recruit explained that he and others were recruited to the anti-colonial cause by sheikhs from Mocimboa da Praia and Tanganyika who snuck across the colonial borders to organize for FRELIMO. Other recruits joined through family ties, with some family members going to fight with FRELIMO while others stayed home, supporting the insurgency, but hedging against its possible defeat. Many Muslim FRELIMO recruits later joined RENAMO during the Mozambican civil war, following anti-religious policies by the new Frelimo government.
The anti-colonial struggle and the current Cabo Delgado insurgency are dramatically different conflicts, but it is easy to see a historical thread of anti-state agitation among coastal Cabo Delgado Muslim communities in response to political grievances. The insurgency in Cabo Delgado does not take place on a blank historical slate, but instead is nested among a series of networks that have long served, with varying levels of success, to help local communities resist state control when they felt threatened by the state. While the viability and relevance of these networks is highly dependent on the level of state or insurgent control being exerted over their members at any given time, the networks have continued to exist.
In this context, the little information available about how the insurgency organizes civilian support can be better understood. We know from frequent attack reports that much of the civilian support for the insurgency is coerced — people are kidnapped and forced to guide insurgent fighters, villagers are made to give up food and other goods during raids. However, the insurgency’s battlefield success and intelligence apparatus suggests that it also enjoys some amount of voluntary civilian support. Yet, in interviews with civilians throughout the conflict zone, no clear evidence has appeared of payoffs from insurgents to cooperating civilians. Insurgents sometimes distribute food to civilians, but those distributions are public demonstrations of the group’s munificence, not private payments in return for services rendered.
Instead, what comes up frequently in discussions with civilians is a sense of the conflict as being political. More than religion or even poverty, the Cabo Delgado liquified natural gas projects are frequently cited as a source of grievance related to the conflict. Some people believe that the insurgents are fighting to control the gas, and others believe that the failure of gas revenues to drive local development created room for rebellion. Either way, many see the apportionment of Mozambique’s gas resources as a central issue in the conflict. These beliefs do not predict civilian feelings about the insurgency one way or another, but they do demonstrate the widespread political awareness of Cabo Delgado civilians. When conditions are right to activate networks of resistance, decisions about whether to do so take place within the larger political context.
That said, it is remarkable how little evidence there is for widespread civilian support of the insurgency, given how militarily successful the insurgency has been. All of the spontaneous civilian organizing we have seen reports on from the conflict zone has been on the pro-government (or at least anti-insurgent) side. Between local self-defense groups asking the government for arms (and, recently, receiving them), ad hoc vigilante groups hunting alleged insurgents themselves, and family and religious networks helping civilians leave areas of insurgent control, civilian efforts that we have been able to track reflect a major preference for the Mozambican state over the insurgency.
The insurgents have also played into this antagonism with civilians, both by killing people and by carrying out a devastating mass displacement campaign that has driven many civilians toward areas of greater government control. So long as insurgents continue to make it difficult for civilian networks of resistance to come to the fore, the effect of those networks on the conflict will remain muted.
Regional Update
Three months on from the emergency meeting of the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) Organ for Politics, Defence and Security in Harare on 19 May, Mozambique has yet to provide a plan of action setting out what support it needs to tackle the insurgency. This plan would form the basis for negotiations with member states on possible assistance through the Organ’s Interstate Committees for Politics and Diplomacy, and Defence and Security. A specific request was made to SADC to see how best member states could share intelligence, and while this will undoubtedly be an important part of the broader regional response to the spread of radicalism and its underpinnings, it will not address Mozambique’s own significant intelligence deficits, which will also be a major challenge for whoever they work with. Indeed, security experts advise the importance of having in place an independent intelligence capacity, although this may not be a practical option.
Mozambique took over as chair of SADC at its 40th Heads of State and Government virtual meeting on 17 August without being able to announce any concrete decisions. It was thus left with little more than platitudes of solidarity. Critics have lambasted SADC for the delays and SADC’s Secretariat itself remains tight-lipped, but the bottom line is Mozambique is dragging its heels on expediting the process.
Some Mozambican analysts argue that they do not need additional ‘boots on the ground,’ but rather bespoke assistance around intelligence sharing, border security, surveillance technology and other practical assistance, including ordnance (weapons and ammunition), armored vehicles, and airlift capacity. Given the Mozambican security force’s current organizational challenges — including reliance on police and military personnel with little or no combat experience, limited leadership competencies, and ineffective supply chains and logistical support — adding boots on the ground from neighboring countries may complicate matters.
The influence of the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG) on Mozambique’s approach to regional cooperation should not be underestimated. DAG have provided the operational backbone to the government’s current counter-insurgency approach. They have secured an expanded and extended contract that focuses on developing a ground force competency drawn from police and military ranks to complement their expanded aerial attack capacity. DAG’s training effort will work to implement the “fire force” military doctrine developed during the Rhodesian bush war, which uses air assault operations to improve military efficiency and take the fight to the enemy. It also relies on efficient logistics and a competent general ground force that can move in and hold an area, allowing the attacking force to move on to its next targets. SADC member states could play an important role strengthening the competencies around supplies and logistics, but must complement this with the necessary command infrastructure. Ideally, any assistance must be designed to enhance proficiencies.
While South Africa is assumed to take the lead on support, its options will be constrained by the available budget. There are options — including strengthening and reconfiguring existing maritime security support through Operation Copper — that are especially important in the face of the insurgents’ emerging coastal strategy. South Africa’s special forces could provide bespoke support from an intelligence or operational standpoint. It could also provide ordnance and some important transport support, although options are limited. While the South African military has demonstrated the potential effectiveness of its Rooivalk attack helicopter, the costs of maintaining an operational capacity is prohibitive, as illustrated by its deployment with the United National Force Intervention Brigade in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Financing remains a primary challenge for any permutation of regional support; options for international subsidies in this regard are also constrained. Given Mozambique’s reluctance to embrace SADC’s peace and security architecture, it seems unlikely a serious effort will be made to promote a multilateral security response that could rely on international funding.
For the moment, the region’s response remains tempered. In mid-August, Angola’s parliament passed legislation that would allow for the deployment of troops abroad. In the second half of August, Tanzania deployed its Southern Brigade to the southern provinces of Ruvuma, Mtwara and Lindi, beefing up existing border security capacity in a series of dragnet operations designed to strengthen border security. Tanzania is also taking on Mozambican refugees, with 800 reportedly in a refugee camp in Mtwara.