12/15/2021 Mozambique (International Christian Concern) –Jihadists in Mozambique are changing their strategy five months after foreign soldiers arrived to defeat an ongoing insurgency, AFP recently reported.

Analysts say that the terrorists have widened their scope beyond Cabo Delgado province and are now launching brutal attacks in neighboring Niassa province and across the border into Tanzania.

“This is something that was expected, that the conflict would evolve, and that it would imply that the insurgents spill into small groups and to find a way to survive,” Borges Nhamire, a Mozambique analyst for the Institute for Security Studies, told AFP.

Victims and eyewitnesses of the attacks say that the groups tactics remain brutal.

 “Over the last week, insurgents set fire to dozens of homes, beheading one person and shooting two others dead in Cabo Delgado’s Macomia district,” a resident told AFP.

“After gunning down one elderly woman, they threw her corpse into a burning building, leaving only charred remains for her grieving family,” said another resident, Abudo Sitaupe.

Beginning in 2017, armed militants, bearing the Islamic State flag, have wreaked havoc primarily in the northern Mozambique province of Cab Delgado. Calling themselves Al-Shabab, the group espouses radical Islamist propaganda, however the movement seems nearly as tied to economic motives as to ideological ones.

In March of 2021, Al-Shabab launched a coordinated attack in Cabo Delgado’s capital of Palma, home to the largest single foreign investment in Africa’s history, a multibillion-dollar gas project.

“There has been heavy fighting since March 25, 2021, when the group…raided the gas-rich town, killing and wounding an unknown number of civilians and causing mass flight,” reported Human Rights Watch.

Witnesses “saw bodies on the streets and residents fleeing after the Al-Shabab fighters fired indiscriminately at people and buildings.”

2021 was the first year that Open Doors listed Mozambique as one of the worst countries to be a Christian. Thousands of believers have been kidnapped, forced to flee, or killed at the hands of these extremists. We ask that you join us in praying for the Lord to bring peace to Mozambique, to strengthen the governments protection over its people, and to heal the trauma that thousands have had to endure.

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