Mozambique / Attacks: Armed group was born 10 years before the first attack – researcher

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Mozambique / Attacks: Armed group was born 10 years before the first attack – researcher

12:33 CAT | 22 Jun 2020

File photo: Lusa

Researcher Eric Morier-Genoud said on Thursday that the groups responsible for the attacks in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique, emerged in 2007, 10 years before the first attack in October 2017.

“[This group] is old, and started in 2007 as an Islamist sect that wanted to have a Muslim government. When that didn’t work, from 2015, they switched to an armed ‘jihad’ movement,” said Eric Morier-Genoud, from Queen’s University, Belfast, said during a webinar on the internal and external dimensions of the armed attacks in northern Mozambique.

The academic calls them “insurgents”, saying that they are against an established secular state, and not part of the self-proclaimed Islamic State terrorist movement (Daesh, in the Arab acronym), which has several times claimed actions in Cabo Delgado.

“The sect existed before the gas and rubies [were discovered], and before the existence of the Islamic State,” Morier-Genoud said, denying that the attacks are a consequence of the discovery of natural resources.

Natural resources did however change the context in which the sect evolved, up until when it became an armed uprising, he explained.

“Poverty probably facilitated the creation of a war, gas was an argument, and the Daesh is creating an international legitimation and advertising network that serves the insurgents,” Morier-Genoud says.

Talk now, he explained, is of the Islamic State and religious insurrection, and although it cannot be reduced to this, it is a starting point.

Cabo Delgado is home to Africa’s largest-ever private investment project, to extract natural gas, which is advancing despite the province being the target, since October 2017, of attacks by insurgents classified by Mozambican and international authorities, since the beginning of the year, as a terrorist threat.

The two-and-half years of conflict in the province are estimated to have claimed at least 600 lives and displaced around 200,000 more.

Source: Lusa