Cabo Ligado Monthly: October 2020
October at a Glance
Vital Stats
ACLED recorded 52 organized political violence events in October, resulting in 164 fatalities across Cabo Delgado and Mtwara region, Tanzania
The violence was deadliest in Palma district, where 38 people were killed, mostly in fighting around Pundanhar near the end of the month, including a battle on 27 October in which authorities claimed 33 insurgents were killed
Other attacks took place in Ibo, Mocimboa da Praia, Muidumbe, Macomia, Meluco, Nangade, and Quissanga districts
Vital Trends
Insurgents expanded their reach into Tanzania toward the end of the month, launching five attacks in Mtwara region in the run up to Tanzanian national elections
Other sharply contested areas include the route between Palma and Mueda — in particular, the area around Pundanhar — and the coast of Macomia district
Increased local militia activity in Palma and Muidumbe districts did not prevent insurgent attacks there, although it appears that the government has doubled down on supporting militias regardless
In This Report
Analysis of the conflict’s extension into Tanzania
A review of variation in insurgent messaging
An update on Mozambique’s efforts to solicit outside assistance for its counterinsurgency effort
October Situation Summary
In a month that marked the three-year anniversary of the insurgency in northern Mozambique, the conflict deepened in northeastern Cabo Delgado province and expanded to include Tanzania.
The Tanzania attacks came in the weeks preceding Tanzanian national elections, beginning with a 14 October strike on Kitaya. In that attack, insurgents came away having inflicted losses on Tanzanian security forces and having captured a WZ-551 armored vehicle. The attacks were quickly trumpeted by the Islamic State. Tanzanian forces responded to the incursions by firing rockets into Mozambican territory, injuring Mozambican civilians. Any diplomatic fallout from that incident has been kept out of the public eye, however.
As the insurgents have worked to internationalize the conflict, the Mozambican government has as well. The European Union (EU) has formally agreed to provide Mozambique humanitarian and security assistance in the conflict, in response to a Mozambican request. The details have not yet been ironed out, but any security assistance will be the first official international intervention in the conflict. Both the Mozambican government and EU diplomats have been clear that the assistance will not include European troops on the ground in Cabo Delgado. However, even a training and equipping mission raises questions about whether EU forces will be aiding Mozambican units credibly accused of committing human rights abuses.
Government-backed local militias also saw more action in October. In Palma and Muidumbe districts in particular, local militias played an increased role in providing security, drawing the ire of the insurgency. The government signaled its support for militias by amplifying (before subsequently denying) a rumor that a militia killed 270 insurgents in Mocimboa da Praia district in the middle of October. There is no evidence that the operation actually took place, but Francisco Quiasse Madiquida, the head of the Mozambican police’s Rapid Intervention Unit, used the story to berate policemen who refused to patrol in Pemba. The story will likely remain a recruiting tool for militias.
In addition to being a site of militia organizing, Palma district was also a battleground in October. Insurgents have been working to cut off the road between Palma town and Mueda, with intermittent success. Mozambican security force operations toward the end of the month re-opened the road, but not before food and gas prices spiked in Palma, leaving people with limited ability to feed themselves. In addition, the heightened sense of insecurity around Palma has increased repression of civilians by government troops, including by implementing night searches of people’s homes.
Conflict Expands into Tanzania
Given the spread of violence into Tanzania in October, labeling the insurgency in northern Mozambique “the Cabo Delgado conflict” is now definitely a misnomer. Insurgents based in the northern Mozambique province launched five attacks across the border in Tanzania in October, clashing with security forces, burning homes, looting goods, and killing civilians. The attacks — first at Kitaya, then at the border post at Kilambo, and then in the villages of Nanyamba, Mihambwe, and Michenjele — constituted the first major insurgent push into Tanzania since fighting broke out in Cabo Delgado in October 2017. An earlier insurgent attack in Tanzania in November 2019 struck Ngongo, a village on an island in the Rovuma river directly on the border between the two countries. No follow-up attacks into Tanzania were subsequently reported.
The Islamic State immediately claimed four of the five recent attacks — the first at Kitaya and then the raids on Nanyamba, Mihambwe, and Michenjele. They published photos from Kitaya of a captured Tanzanian armored personnel carrier. To understand how this development will shape the future of the conflict, we must look at both the history of Islamist ideology and violence in Tanzania, as well as the state of the Tanzania-Mozambique relationship.
In recent years, mainland Tanzania has been a frequent target of Islamist violence. Starting in 2013, militants aligned with the Ansar Muslim Youth Center (AMYC), based in the northern Tanzanian city of Tanga, began launching attacks on Christian churches and other targets. AMYC is affiliated with Somalia-based Al Shabaab. The same year, Tanzanian authorities arrested 13 people also associated with Somali Al Shabaab at a training camp in Mtwara region, just across the border from Mozambique. The violence has increased over the years. At its height in 2017, suspected Islamist attackers killed over 30 police and local government officials in Pwani region in small, targeted attacks. The attacks led to a brutal crackdown by Tanzanian authorities in August 2017, which pushed militants underground and slowed the pace of attacks significantly.
Two months later, the first attacks by the Cabo Delgado insurgents broke out in Mocimboa da Praia. The evidence for direct connections between the Tanzania attackers and the Mozambican insurgents is circumstantial but substantial. AMYC is closely associated with the late Kenyan cleric Aboud Rogo, whose recorded exhortations to violence are known to be a recruiting tool and source of ideology for the Cabo Delgado insurgents. Indeed, much of the work on the religious origins of the Cabo Delgado insurgency has highlighted the role of exchanges between Mozambican and Tanzanian clerics in developing the distinctive form of Islamic practice and politics that define the insurgency.
Furthermore, according to one source, Pwani militants fled south to Mtwara when Tanzanian forces drove them out of Pwani in August 2017. The Mozambique-Tanzania border is long and porous, with many people traveling frequently between the countries in peacetime. It would have been easy for the militants, once in Mtwara, to cross into Mozambique. Indeed, the evidence for at least some Tanzanian involvement in the Cabo Delgado insurgency is strong. Both Tanzanian and Mozambican security officials have acknowledged that there are Tanzanians among the insurgents. A video of the Kitaya attack shows attackers speaking kiSwahili and framing the attack as a strike against Tanzanian president John Magufuli.
Whatever collaboration there is between Tanzanian and Mozambican militants, collaboration between the Tanzanian and Mozambican governments will be required to defeat them. In borderland insurgencies, borders can serve to create sanctuaries for insurgent groups — places insurgents can go to escape the jurisdiction of the targeted state. Mozambican authorities have long complained of insurgents using a foreign sanctuary, which can only be a reference to Tanzania. Meanwhile, the insurgents’ recent occupation of Mocimboa da Praia gives them a stable base from which to launch attacks into Tanzania.
Historically, cooperation between the two countries has been close. Frelimo was founded in Dar es Salaam, and Tanzania provided crucial support during Mozambique’s independence struggle. Yet, during the course of the Cabo Delgado insurgency, the relationship has been more contentious. Despite a January 2018 memorandum of understanding between Mozambican and Tanzanian police pledging mutual support against the insurgency, the joint operations promised in the memorandum have yet to materialize. Instead, Tanzania has mostly acted unilaterally to try and close the border area just north of Cabo Delgado to any outsiders, going as far as to expel Mozambican refugees who entered the area to flee the violence in Cabo Delgado. More concerningly, Tanzanian security forces responded to the recent attacks by launching rockets into Mozambique, injuring 12 civilians.
Yet there are indications that the relationship is thawing as the need for cooperation becomes more clear. Mozambique avoided any public condemnation of the rocket attack, which would have been well warranted, and chose instead to send Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosário to attend Magufuli’s second inauguration in early November. The two met in private and discussed the conflict, after which Agostinho do Rosário made a statement emphasizing both country’s commitment to working together. Privately, sources have reported that cross-border cooperation between Mozambican and Tanzanian security services have begun to improve recently, despite the rocket incident. Increased coordination is crucial to Mozambique’s counterinsurgency effort, but it comes with a red flag. As demonstrated in the runup to the recent Tanzanian election, Magufuli’s security forces are no more committed to respecting human rights than their Mozambican counterparts. There is a risk that, as counterinsurgency partners, the two forces will feed into each other’s most repressive instincts.
Insurgent Messaging
A good baseline for understanding insurgent messaging comes from the first video the insurgency released before there were any acknowledged links between the insurgency and the Islamic State. That video, while short on specifics, alludes to a universal Salafist philosophy with a distinctly political bent. The speaker urges Mozambicans to accept the Quran as law and to join what he calls a “party of God” to bring about Quranic rule. That appeal to Islamism as a political future worth fighting for is the fundamental theme insurgents return to over and over in their statements. Yet the insurgency does not speak with one voice. Depending on the speaker and the audience, the insurgency’s Islamist theme is often altered, woven into other messages, or set aside altogether.
One example of differential messaging by the insurgency is in its recruiting. Analysts have access to very few clear accounts of the insurgency’s recruiting process, but what we have shows a range of approaches for speaking to potential recruits. Accounts of early recruiting emphasize ideological appeals, especially for people who were already embedded into early insurgent social networks. Videos of the Kenyan cleric Aboud Rogo were a prime source of indoctrination, and were shown in madrassas and distributed on social media channels.
More recently, financial appeals have dominated accounts of recruitment. For example, a young man was reportedly recruited from Chiure district in October to a band of insurgents near Bilibiza, Quissanga district by the prospect of pay and the promise that he would become a strong, well-trained fighter. The wooing was capped off by a down payment made to him via M-Pesa. Once he joined the group, however, ideology took on greater importance, with his new commanders ordering him to shave his dreadlocks in deference to Islamic practice.
This shift — from practical inducements when audiences are outside the insurgent orbit to ideological messaging once they are inside insurgent networks — is common in insurgent communications. People living in areas under insurgent control report a marked shift in insurgent communication from threats — for example, threats to kill civilians who collaborate with the government — toward indoctrination, such as being forced to listen to lectures about Aboud Rogo’s sermons, as the level of insurgent control increases. Variation in insurgent control is likely the most relevant variable determining insurgent communication strategy with various audiences.
Another crucial determinant is the identity of the insurgents. The initial insurgent video’s message was explicitly by and for Mozambicans, with the speaker addressing his “Mozambican brothers and sisters.” Yet Mozambicans are not the only members of the insurgency, nor are they in clear control of all insurgent messaging. Much of the messaging that has been most confounding to observers — insurgent graffiti in English, for example — makes more sense if it is understood as originating from foreign sources. Messaging from foreign sources was most starkly on display in October during the insurgent attack on Kitaya, Tanzania. A video released from the attack showed insurgents proclaiming “We’ve come to remove Magufuli,” referring to Tanzanian President John Magufuli. Indeed, it seems that all the recent attacks on Tanzania may have been an effort to influence Magufuli’s political fortunes. Insurgents launched five attacks in Tanzania during the two weeks leading up to Tanzanian national election in which Magufuli was up for reelection. They have not struck north of the Rovuma river since.
Foreign narratives and modes of communication are not new to the insurgency. Reports of insurgents identifying themselves as Tanzanians and speaking to Mozambican civilians in kiSwahili date back to December 2017. What is new is competition between insurgent messaging on the ground, transmitted to local civilians either face to face or through social media, and sophisticated messaging from the Islamic State. In the last year, Islamic State propagandists have worked hard to give the conflict global importance by placing the Cabo Delgado insurgency in a context with Islamic State-associated movements worldwide and issuing warnings against states considering support for Mozambique’s counterinsurgency effort. These messages have not found their way into everyday insurgent communication, however, from either Mozambican or foreign sources. Even during the Tanzania attacks, which could be seen as a fulfillment of the Islamic State’s threats against Mozambican ally countries and were swiftly claimed by the Islamic State, the attackers identified themselves as “Al Shabaab from Mozambique” rather than representatives of the Islamic State.
It may well be the case that the Islamic State will exert greater control over insurgent messaging in the future, as there has clearly been an effort within the organization to develop narratives specific to Mozambique. So far, however, messaging has been dictated by actors and circumstances on the ground in Cabo Delgado. Until the insurgents decide to make a major effort to persuade people not under their immediate control to join the insurgency, this decentralized approach to messaging is likely to remain in place.
International Support Update
As the security and humanitarian situation in Cabo Delgado continues to deteriorate, there is growing consternation about the apparent lack of progress by Maputo to secure much needed support.
The High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union (EU), Josep Borell, formally responded to Mozambique’s September request for assistance on 9 October. He declared a willingness to help Mozambique, without defining what exactly that would entail. EU assistance in general will “encourage and support the development of an integrated approach to deal with armed violence in Cabo Delgado.” This should include exploring if and how the domestic response can be tied to regional — that is, Southern African Development Community (SADC) — support, itself a subject of some mystery (see below).
The next step is for the EU and Mozambique to engage in a “policy dialogue” that will focus on the details of humanitarian and security issues which will help provide clarity on needs and possible areas of support. Some EU members, (i.e. France, Portugal, and Germany) are keen to expedite the process, but a rapid intervention appears unlikely. The EU will understandably proceed with caution as it must establish some basic facts on the ground. Indeed, some see this as an opportunity to test Maputo’s thinking and plans to address the interlocking challenges around the insurgency. Current communications from the Mozambican government have not been impressive, rather they reflect the paucity of a clear strategy.
The ball is very much in Maputo’s court as it must provide explanations and assessments about current conditions and where and how needs must best be met. Maputo is playing its cards close to its chest and has not rushed into the expected dialogue. As such, and as we have seen with the SADC process and others prospective support (i.e. the French maritime security offer), nothing concrete is yet on the table. There is still ample time to work out the details, but by the end of October there had been no tangible progress on possible EU assistance.
Along with other donors, there is interest in supporting the recently launched Northern Development Agency (ADIN) as the best vehicle for addressing longer term human security, development, conflict resolution, and deradicalization challenges. There are concerns ADIN will not have relevant competencies to drive such a complex agenda. The ongoing poor handling of the humanitarian crisis gives pause for consideration on what is actually feasible. Mozambique needs a strategy to counter violent extremism more broadly, something that goes beyond a narrow focus on counterterrorism capacity. There is significant experience on these issues internationally, which Mozambique can learn from, but success in translating this into practical action requires a major investment in local capacity. There is no time to lose under these circumstances. Such programming is only feasible in a secure environment, which places an immediate prioritization on a plethora of hard security challenges. The EU may be able to provide some support on this front too, from training to non-lethal equipment support. Any requests by the Mozambican government will have to be clearly justified.
Analysts suggest the lack of urgency reflects hesitancy, even deliberate foot-dragging, from some quarters within the Mozambican establishment. Much of the apparent lack of cohesion in the state’s response to the insurgency reflects the influence of powerful elements within the ruling party and state security structures who do not trust external elements and retain a “hard sovereignty” posture that rejects opening space for international assistance they might regard as invasive.
These issues appear to also play a role in terms of Mozambique’s relationship to SADC’s peace and security responsibilities. It has been over five months since Mozambique was requested to compile a framework of requests to SADC’s Organ on Politics, Defence and Security, but Maputo has not demonstrated any sense of urgency in securing the regional body’s engagement. Why not? Some Cabo Ligado sources claim Maputo has effectively taken the SADC process off the table, but will continue to explore bilateral options for support. In the region, this includes discussions with Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tanzania and Angola, although by the end of October there were no tangible agreements in place. Tanzania’s deportation of Mozambicans who have fled from Cabo Delgado reflects a fundamental failure to find a mutually acceptable approach for dealing with the growing number of IDPs.
Despite Maputo’s approach, several commentators continue to ask why SADC (and the African Union) is not coming to Mozambique’s defense. In theory, SADC could assist if it determines there is a threat to regional peace and security, a position already articulated by certain member states for some months. The extension of physical attacks into Tanzania this month may continue, underscoring the importance of shoring up security and intelligence cooperation, or at the very least developing practical plans for doing so. A wider geographical expansion of the insurgency in the short to medium term is unlikely as insurgents focus on survival and consolidating gains in Cabo Delgado. The region, however, traditionally takes a deferential approach on sovereignty and would seek consensus before mandating intervention. This would not happen without Mozambique’s green light, especially as it currently holds the SADC Chairship. In late October, Zimbabwe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF, called on SADC to invoke SADC’s Mutual Defence Pact to assist Mozambique.
Mozambique’s options remain constrained by major financial limitations. Additional budget allocations for the security sector are woefully insufficient, even if they are the main expenditure line items. Analysts remain puzzled as to how the government is paying for private military contractors and for some of the new equipment that has been secured and in the pipeline.
The extent of Maputo’s debt challenge remains a huge concern. The Centre for Public Integrity has highlighted continuing opacity around the estimated $2bn owed to China, and have asked the government for clarity on how it plans to manage this, on top of other burgeoning debt obligations. The continuing lack of transparency around Mozambique’s debt management is likely to have an ongoing chilling effect on the kind of assistance external actors are prepared to provide in tackling the insurgency.