Insurgency in Cabo Delgado

Although the violence has been perpetrated by Muslim youth and the villages attacked have been primarily Muslim settlements, the Islamic side of the crisis has been continually downplayed by various pundits and Mozambican officials. Yet the group’s only public communication, a video released in January, suggests that it believes it is fighting a jihad. So what role does Islam play in the conflict?

The Mozambican government recently declared an alliance with the Islamic Council of

Mozambique (Conselho Islâmico de Moçambique, or CISLAMO) in order to end the

insurgency in Cabo Delgado. In a program funded in part by the United States, the

government and CISLAMO will work together to counter violent extremist recruiting

e􀃠orts in northern Mozambique. This alliance, however, might not work as well as the

government hopes.

The violent insurgency in northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado, that started in October 2017 and is still ongoing, caught the government of the country and the public by surprise. Although this insurgency remains largely unexplored and little understood, the only study done so far has suggested that it is being carried out by Muslim youth connected to Islamic radicalism, in particular to the Harakat al-Shabaab of Somalia and its offshoots in Kenya, Tanzania, and as far as DRC.1 Islam has a long history in Mozambique, since probably the eighth century.2 According to the 2017 National Population Census, Muslims account for about 18% of the total population the country and 58% of the Cabo Delgado inhabitants. However, Mozambique had never had any visible Islamist radical political movement before.