Cabo Ligado Weekly: 5-11 April
By the Numbers: Cabo Delgado, October 2017-April 2021
Figures updated as of 9 April 2021.
Total number of organized violence events: 856
Total number of reported fatalities from organized violence: 2,780
Total number of reported fatalities from civilian targeting: 1,378
All ACLED data are available for download via the data export tool and curated data files.
Situation Summary
Even with clashes from the actual battle for Palma over, insecurity in the town continued last week. On 6 April, a government patrol on the outskirts of the town uncovered a weapons cache that included four AKM assault rifles, four PKM machine guns, two 60mm mortar tubes, 20 rocket propelled grenades, ammunition for a AGS-17 grenade launcher, and medical supplies. Government forces arrested three people in connection with the cache.
On the afternoon of 8 April, seven insurgents entered the village of Novo Cabo Delgado, in northwestern Macomia district near the Muidumbe district border. Finding it deserted, they looted food and other goods from the village. As they left, they were ambushed by members of a local militia. In the ensuing firefight, militia members killed three insurgents. One militia member was killed and another wounded. The surviving militia members identified two of the dead insurgents as being locals from Miangalewa, a village in Muidumbe district about 10 kilometers to the north.
Near Pemba, United Nations staff members narrowly avoided disaster when a car they were in passed through an area controlled by the Mozambican military at Chuiba beach on 10 April. The vehicle sped off to avoid a military checkpoint, and soldiers fired at the car. No one was injured in the incident.
Back in Palma, a man who had been displaced by the attack on the town returned to his home to find a significant cache of food there. He reported the situation to authorities on 10 April and, as a police source reported to Bloomberg journalist Borges Nhamirre, was found beheaded on 11 April. The man’s killing is an indication that even if insurgents are not openly stationed in Palma town, they can still access the area with relative ease to enforce their ban on civilian collaboration with the government.
At the Total project site on Afungi, sources report that roughly 50 South Africans, some armed, were flown into the site last week. It is unclear what their role will be at the site, but sources speculate that they may be charged with protecting the site from both insurgents and potential looting by government security forces.
Further information emerged last week about the toll taken by the Palma attacks. Mozambican military spokesman Chongo Vidigal told reporters on 9 April that government forces had confirmed 36 insurgents were killed during the fight for Palma. He said he expected that number to rise as more information becomes available.
A civilian who fled Palma for Pemba after the attacks told MediaFax that he had seen 87 dead civilians in Palma after the attacks -- 80 Mozambicans and seven white people the man believed to be foreigners. The man’s testimony contradicts a claim by Mozambican police that 12 white people were killed by insurgents and were later buried by police in a mass grave outside the Amarula Palma Hotel. A survivor of the Amarula siege also cast doubt on the police claim, saying that no foreigners were killed just outside the hotel but that he witnessed insurgents beheading Mozambicans within 50 meters of the hotel entrance. Only three foreigners have so far been confirmed dead in the attack, including a Zimbabwean man who the Zimbabwean government claims was one of the 12 people beheaded outside the Amarula.
Mozambican national broadcaster TVM reported on the looting of the town, showing the ruins of Palma’s banking and cellular communication infrastructure. According to their report, insurgents made off with around $1 million from the banks as well as six tons of food. Other reports suggest that it was government security forces who looted at least one of the banks, along with parts of the Amarula Palma Hotel. It is unclear if the food referred to came from the World Food Program warehouse that was looted or from another source. Cellular service was still out in the town as of 11 April.
Another survivor of the Palma attack reported that insurgents told civilians they would be in Pemba within six months. Those threats, alongside reports that insurgents were among the displaced civilians who fled to Pemba from Palma, have increased concerns of an impending attack on Pemba. The likelihood of an insurgent occupation of Pemba in the foreseeable future is quite low. The last time insurgents attempted to move that far south en masse, they were turned away in Metuge district by a combination of Mozambican ground forces and Dyck Advisory Group helicopters. Those helicopters are now gone and their replacements are untested, which does make Pemba more vulnerable than it was before. The open terrain in Metuge, however, still overwhelmingly favors government forces, and government supply lines into Pemba are secure. Any insurgent attacks in Pemba in the near term would have to be the kind of one off terror attacks that the insurgency has eschewed so far in the conflict.
Incident Focus: OMR Report
A new report from the Rural Environment Observatory (OMR), a well-regarded Mozambican think tank, offers new insights into the inner workings of the Cabo Delgado insurgency. Based on interviews with 23 women who escaped insurgent captivity, the report portrays the insurgency as a sophisticated operation with a specialized division of labor. In addition to multimedia specialists (presumably the people responsible for shooting the photos and videos that sometimes accompany Islamic State claims of attacks in Cabo Delgado), the women reported dedicated nurses, mechanics, and communications personnel. The women said that the most common languages spoken in the insurgent camps are Kimwani and Swahili, but that KiMacua (accented as though the speakers were from Nampula province) and even the more southern language of Changana were also spoken. They also reported seeing people from elsewhere along the East African coast, including Tanzania and Somalia.
According to the women, captured civilians are forced to undergo significant ideological training in insurgent camps. In addition, boys are given military training, apparently in hopes of turning them into insurgent fighters. One woman recounted the story of a boy of 14 who had been brought into the insurgent ranks and bragged about having killed during an attack.
The women also assert that the insurgency engages in human trafficking, sending women away with the promise that they have been selected to study in Tanzania. The report authors believe that the women are actually sold into human trafficking networks that reach into Europe and the Middle East.
Government Response
As of 10 April, the United Nations International Organization for Migration put the number of civilians it has registered as displaced from Palma into other districts since 27 March as a result of the attacks there at 15,179, an increase of about 3,500 since 5 April. Many of the later arrivals fled Palma by foot -- over 3,600 of the total displaced people arriving in other districts have walked there. The journey is often extremely arduous, with people walking long distances without supplies and under threat from insurgents. According to a UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) report, insurgents “specifically targeted civilians on-the-run,” which made journeys even longer as civilians hid from insurgents in the bush. According to a man who made the most common escape on foot, over land from Palma to Nangade, the toll of the trip was extraordinarily high. Of the roughly 50 people he left with, 15 died along the way of hunger and thirst.
In a press conference, UNHCR also revised up an earlier estimate for the number of civilians displaced from Palma that had been deported from Tanzania or barred from entering the country since the attack. UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch said on 6 April that 1,000 Mozambicans had been denied the opportunity to seek asylum in Tanzania. An earlier estimate put the number at 600.
The UN also reports that there are 23,000 people still displaced in Quitunda, the resettlement village just outside the Total project site on the Afungi peninsula -- as noted last week, other estimates are substantially higher. The Mozambican government, however, is already working to return people displaced from Palma to the town. Provincial governor Valige Tauabo acknowledged that security in Palma was a prerequisite for people returning home, but expressed hope that conditions would be in place for homecomings in a matter of days.
Mozambican president Filipe Nyusi last week appointed a ministerial task force to address the humanitarian crisis brought on by the attack. The task force comes three and a half years into the conflict and after nearly 700,000 Mozambicans have already been displaced from their homes and are suffering from a lack of preparation on the government’s part. The task force is said to include agriculture minister Celso Correia, whose work managing the humanitarian response to Cyclone Idai has been lauded, but whose leadership of the Northern Integrated Development Agency (ADIN) has left much to be desired.
Correia defended ADIN’s record to reporters last week, clarifying that, despite earlier claims to the contrary, the agency will be responsible for humanitarian operations. Instead, he said, ADIN’s work will be focused on development projects. The group has plans to spend about $1 billion on projects in Mozambique’s three northern provinces. No details of those planned projects are yet available, and the agency’s strategic planning process is still underway.
In the meantime, humanitarian operations are facing struggles even outside of the immediate conflict zone. A World Food Program warehouse in Chiure district, where an estimated 12,600 displaced civilians are living across six relocation sites, was burgled in March. 500 kilograms of rice and a substantial amount of cooking oil was taken. The theft only increased tensions around food distribution in the district. Recently, there was a scuffle near the warehouse after some people receiving food aid were accused of not being displaced.
On the national front, President Nyusi said in a speech on 7 April that his government had launched a major investigation into alleged human rights abuses by government forces in Cabo Delgado, and promised accountability for those found responsible. The announcement is a major departure from the government’s long-held policy of blanket denials when faced with allegations of abuse. Nyusi justified the move by pointing out, correctly, that establishing trust between security forces and Cabo Delgado civilians is crucial to the government’s military effort in the province. Yet the change of policy coming at this point could also be a reflection of the increased US involvement in the conflict. Under US law, foreign units cannot receive US assistance if they have engaged in human rights abuses with impunity. If abusers are found and punished, however, US training assistance could be available for a greater proportion of Mozambican forces.
Expanded US support for Mozambique is on the table, as State Department officials made clear in a press conference last week. Julie Cabus, a deputy assistant secretary in the department’s bureau of diplomatic security said that the department had “only recently been asked to assess Mozambique for an ATA [Antiterrorism Assistance] program, which we are very excited about and are looking forward to our continued partnership with Mozambique.” ATA programming is directed at law enforcement, offering US training and equipment to police forces for counterterrorism missions.
Expanded support may also be on the way from the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Following an Extraordinary Double Troika Summit in Maputo on 8 April to discuss the Cabo Delgado conflict, SADC agreed to send a technical mission to Mozambique to draw up a plan for a security support package that could include direct military intervention. Nyusi, who had long dragged his feet on enabling SADC involvement in the conflict, offered no objection to the mission. The technical team is scheduled to report its findings by 28 April. The team is expected to begin its work on 15 April, and will have less than two weeks to draw up its plan of action. Producing a plan will be difficult, as it will require consensus agreement among the interested parties.
The technical mission represents the first step forward toward SADC intervention in months, but it does not change the financial and capacity limitations under which Mozambique’s SADC partners are operating. COVID-19 and other factors have combined to severely limit the latitude regional militaries have for foreign deployments, suggesting that SADC assistance may be less substantial than advocates for regional intervention might hope. Indeed, Nyusi seemed to rule out major foreign deployments in Mozambique, saying in a speech that Mozambique will defend its sovereignty and that foreign interveners will “not come to replace us, they will come to support us.” Still, however, Nyusi’s openness to the SADC technical team does represent a distinct shift toward the Mozambican government being open to regional intervention.
Incident List
5 April 2021: Palma
8 April 2021: Macomia
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