Aida remembers what the evildoers said: “Saiam da nossa frente” – Lusa | Mozambique

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Aida remembers what the evildoers said: “Saiam da nossa frente” – Lusa | Mozambique

9:36 CAT | 31 Mar 2021

Photo: Lusa

“We came face to face with them, but thankfully they didn’t do anything,” she says, adding that it was only after two days that the attackers started “reacting badly” when meeting people wandering through the bush.

Aida Cisto, 29, remembers well what the ‘evildoers’ who attacked Palma told the group she was escaping with during a fortuitous encounter: “Get out of our way” “Saiam da nossa frente”].

Aida was in Palma when the attackers struck on Wednesday, March 24, and joined a group of people fleeing to the beach.

“We saw a canoe, and called for help,” she told Lusa, not least because “on the other bank were the ‘evildoers'”, as she calls the attackers.

“We came face to face with them, but thankfully they didn’t do anything,” she says, adding that it was only after two days that the attackers started “reacting badly” when meeting people wandering through the bush.

The insurgents “did not fire at us, they just said, ‘Get out of our way'”, Aida recalls. They then walked faster.

Today, she speaks from the safety of Pemba, with her one-month-old baby daughter on her lap, after they were both evacuated on one of the chartered flights transferring people from the Afungi area using the nearby airstrip belonging to the gas project complex.

“We were really hungry,” she says, but did not stop breastfeeding her daughter: “We had to put up with it.” And they did, even while they spent nights when “there was no sleep: only shooting, until yesterday [Monday]”.

“I lost many friends due to hunger,” lack of food luring them back to Palma, still in the hands of the insurgents. Aida remembers the last words of one of them: “I am saturated. I am going there [to Palma].” Estou saturada. Vou para lá. “They shot her.”

Other women friends of Aida “were cut”, falling victim to the machete blows with which the armed groups in Cabo Delgado are known to behead people.

The sun has already set in Pemba, and for Aida Cisto, the night, for the first time in six days, will not resound with gunfire.

Sitting on the lawn in front of Pemba airport among the dozens of other displaced families, Aida is waiting for her husband and, hopefully, a house with four walls.

“I’m going to have to start over from scratch,” she concludes, but that’s a concern for tomorrow.

According to the Mozambican Ministry of Defence, dozens of civilians were killed in the attack on Palma, near the border with Tanzania. The Islamic State terrorist movement on Monday claimed control of the town.

The area where the gas project infrastructure is being built is about 25 kilometres from the town of Palma and was not affected by the attacks and ensuing clashes between the armed groups and the Mozambican Defence and Security Forces.

The violence there is causing a humanitarian crisis with almost 700,000 displaced people and more than 2,000 deaths.

Source: Lusa