This part of Mozambique was like paradise. He is now a Terrorist Hotbed.

In October, we traveled to Cabo Delgado Province in northern Mozambique to understand how terrorists who claim affiliation with the Islamic State gained a foothold and wreaked havoc on Muslims and Christians.

Officials in the region and in the West say they are deeply concerned that if the Islamic State affiliate known as ISIS-Mozambique is not contained, then the Islamic State network that has gained ground in the pockets of Africa could become a greater global threat. .

What the locals call “the war” has robbed the region of what was a largely peaceful life of fishing and farming.

Almost 6,000 people were killed and up to half of the province’s 2.3 million people were displaced. Finding food and shelter has become a daily struggle in a province rich in natural resources such as rubies, gas and wood.

Since our visit, the country has only become more tense. After a disputed presidential election, Mozambique was engulfed in the worst election-related violence since a long civil war that ended in 1992. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the country to protest a result that many I believe it was rigged. by the ruling party, Frelimo. Nearly 300 people were killed during the protests, according to the Decide Electoral Platform, a civil society organization.

On top of that, Cabo Delgado and Nampula province to the south took a direct hit from Cyclone Chido in mid-December, killing as many as. 120 peopledisplacing tens of thousands, and leaving many without food and clean water.

There is little doubt that the insurgency is at its weakest, diplomats and security analysts say, down to a few hundred fighters from several thousand. That’s mostly because international troops, led by the Rwandan military, have picked up the slack for Mozambique’s ill-equipped and ill-trained armed forces.

But the insurgents have split into small groups scattered across the dense forests of a province roughly the size of Austria, turning the conflict into a game of Whac-a-Mole, security experts said. Attacks are smaller than in the past. But they were more frequent in 2024 than in 2023, and they spread to previously unaffected areas.

“The government is doing the best it can,” Valige Tauabo, the governor of the province, said in an interview.

Where the uprising began

Our Cessna 206 landed on an airstrip in Mocimboa da Praia, a sleepy fishing village that was the birthplace of the insurgency. A Rwandan soldier in battle armor watched over us from the control tower.

Due to the high risk of ambushes, we had to charter a flight from the provincial capital, Pemba, a luxury that few residents can afford.

We jumped into a sedan that went around the barricades set up by the Rwandan army and made our way into the village.

In October 2017, more than two dozen insurgents robbed a police station in Mocimboa da Praia and killed two officers the first attack of the insurrection.

Then, the group was called Al Shabab (analysts say it is not affiliated with the Shabab in Somalia). Researchers say had started training around 2005when the teachings of extremist clerics from neighboring Tanzania to the north began to infiltrate the mosques and madrassas in Cabo Delgado.

To win over the recruits, the extremists told the locals that while they were struggling in poverty, their land was rich in natural resources. Lucrative natural gas reserves that had attracted about $24 billion in foreign investmentincluding nearly $5 billion from the United States, they were nearby, outside the coastal city of Palma.

Resentment of the government grows with multiple reports of the Mozambican army assaulting or killing civilians in Palma.

But the insurgents’ first message was quickly lost in their brutality.

In March 2020, Islamist militants gathered the residents of the village on a soccer field in Mocimboa da Praia and warned them not to associate with the government, or “we will behead everyone”, recalled Sanula Issa .

Just a couple of weeks later, Ms Issa said, she was woken up early in the morning by gunfire and shouting, “Allahu akbar!”

She ran to the beach with her husband and three children, she said, and tried to pile into boats with others. But the insurgents took her husband and beheaded him with a machete, said Ms. Issa, 33, wiping away tears with a pink scarf.

“They are bad,” said Ms. Issa, who once cooked rice for the sailors. “They’re ruining people’s lives — innocent people.”

But it is not as if the locals turned to the government.

“Our antipathy goes both ways,” said Rabia Muandimo Issa, who is not related to Sanula Issa. He lost his brother and sister, and his home in Mocimboa da Praia, in an insurgent attack five years ago. “We don’t see any good coming from either the government or the insurgents.”

A Displacement Crisis

For most of his 20s, Muinde Macassari lived a comfortable life in a shack by the ocean, fishing with his family. But since insurgents stormed his seaside village of Quiterajo two years ago, he has been sleeping on blankets in his aunt’s garden in Pemba, sharing a tent with two relatives.

The heat in the torn tent becomes oppressive, and the rain pours through the torn fabric.

Hundreds of thousands of people have returned to their communities, only to find that their jobs, homes and stability are now gone.

Hundreds of thousands of others, like Mr. Macassari, live displaced in unknown communities.

More than 80,000 displaced people are now crowded into Pemba, which previously had about 200,000 residents. Aid organizations say the Mozambique conflict is not receiving the necessary assistance because it is overshadowed by other global crises.

Mothers with babies strapped to their backs crowd clinics for the treatment of child malnutrition. Displaced people sleep in the low houses of family, friends and good Samaritans, using sheets as dividing walls.

Mr. Macassari sleeps outside because his aunt’s squat, two-bedroom concrete house is already full of 10 people.

He had been kidnapped by insurgents, he said, forced to wash his clothes and guard, but says he was never sent into battle. He slept in the forest on an uncomfortable bed made of coconut leaves and ate only occasional portions of rice, wheat and cassava.

Mr Macassari said he understood some of the complaints the extremists preached – about the political elite traveling in fancy cars while everyone else was poor. But if the complaints of the insurgents are with the government, Mr. Macassari asked, “why are they killing innocent people?”

He escaped one night, using a bathroom break as an excuse, he said. He ran through the bush until he reached a nearby village.

A Return to the sour house

When the insurgents captured Cheia Cassiano during an attack on Mocimboa da Praia in early 2020, they offered him a choice: you can join us, or we can kill you.

The following year, Mr. Cassiano, now 37, said insurgents forced him to run, lift weights, shoot a gun — and attack villages. They preached their strong message: The war will not end until the end of the world; men should wear trousers and women long skirts; everyone needed to pledge allegiance to Islam, not the government.

“I was anxious,” Mr. Cassiano said. “In the insurgency, when you don’t do according to the plan, they can kill you.”

The insurgents took control of Mocimboa da Praia in August 2020 and held it for a year, until the troops of Rwanda and the countries of southern Africa removed it. It was the longest the insurgents had occupied a city in the course of the conflict.

Mocimboa da Praia emptied during the occupation in 2020. But in 2022, residents began to return and life in many ways seems to have returned to normal. A downtown market buzzes at night with street vendors and growling motorcycle taxis. Fishermen gather around a sandy cove at dawn, prepare nets and wooden boats, and dry fish on tarps. Teams compete on dirt soccer fields.

But with a little probing, it’s easy to find deep physical and mental scars.

The bell tower of the Catholic church in the center of the city is tall, but most of the building has been reduced to rumble. Next door, an elementary school is mostly run down, with faded writing on a blackboard reminding parents of a deadline, now years old, to enroll their children. A hospital infirmary is just a metal skeleton.

Where stood statues of two of Mozambique’s liberation heroes, Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel, there are only broken foundations.

Many residents returned after the fight to find empty pieces of land where their houses made of red clay and thin logs once stood.

Mr. Cassiano, who joined the fighters after he was kidnapped, said his house was burned. He rebuilt it and now sells the fish for life, but he bears a visible scar of the conflict: his right hand is missing. He said he got into a dispute with his fellow insurgents over a bike he took from a village they raided. They accused him of stealing the bike from a group leader, he said, and, in accordance with his interpretation of Shariah law, cut off his hand.

Try to heal

At a community center near a displacement camp in Mocimboa da Praia, children in an art therapy workshop sometimes draw headless stick figures, or sculpt mounds of clay into guns.

One day recently, the children sat in a circle singing, keeping the rhythm by slapping plastic bottles full of rocks on the ground.

“Children have a right to play,” they sang, “and to live like a child.”

A 12-year-old girl said she was only 8 years old when she was kidnapped by insurgents from Mocimboa da Praia and sexually assaulted several times while in captivity. She was once beaten for not wearing her hijab properly. She escaped into the bush with several women, and says she ate sand to stay alive.

She acted erratically when she returned home, said her aunt and uncle, with whom she lives because her parents were killed in an insurgent attack.

“I saw people killed!” she screamed in sudden outbursts, said the aunt.

Now she’s back at school, and said she’s started to recover by spending time with other child survivors who meet at the center, run by the Community Development Foundation, a local non-profit organization.. As we sat on the ground talking, she looked down, tracing the sand with a twig. The horrible things he experienced, he said, are now motivation for his life ahead.

“I want to be a nurse,” she said, “to help other people in my community.”