Mozambique/Rwanda joint force prepares offensive on Mocimboa – DW

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Mozambique/Rwanda joint force prepares offensive on Mocimboa – DW

8:39 CAT | 06 Aug 2021

File photo: DW

Mozambican and Rwandan military personnel are preparing an offensive to recover the main town of Mocimboa da Praia, which has been under the control of insurgents for months. Meanwhile, in Maputo, President Nyusi received the President of the Comoros at a meeting where Cabo Delgado and regional security was on the table.

Joint Mozambican and Rwandan forces already control some parts of the district of Mocimboa da Praia previously by insurgents, and their objective is now to recover the main town, according to official sources.

“The Mozambican force, with its Rwandan sister, is fighting terrorism and we are going forward,” Aiuba Amide, a commander in the police Rapid Intervention Unit now in Awassi told the media. Awassi is one of rebel strongholds recently recovered by the joint force.

In addition to Awassi, which is about 50 kilometres from Mocimboa town, the joint force has also reoccupied insurgent positions in Diaca, seizing war material and shooting several members of the group, according to a source linked to the Ministry of Defence and cited by Lusa news agency.

The coastal village of Mocimboa da Praia, considered by many the insurgents’ ‘base’, was invaded and occupied for a day by rebels on March 23 last year in an action claimed by the ‘Islamic State’ group. At the end of June 2020, the village was the scene of long clashes, which led to the flight of a considerable part of the population.

The Mozambican military counts on the support of Rwandans for the offensive against Mocímboa da Praia

Reports on radicalisation in Comoros

In Maputo, President Filipe Nyusi held talks with President of the Union of the Comoros, Azali Assoumani. The two leaders addressed the security crisis in Cabo Delgado.

Read: Mozambique: Nyusi meets Comoros President – photos

As Christian Jokinen, an expert on political violence and terrorism, wrote in an article published by The Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor in December: “In the past, the Comoros archipelago, though predominantly Muslim, has been considered an unlikely breeding ground for jihadism because Comoran Islam is generally tolerant.”

“However, several known jihadists are known to have emerged from Comoros. One of them was late al-Qaeda commander in East Africa and Osama bin Laden’s ‘confidential secretary,’ Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who was killed in Somalia in 2006,” writes Jokine, adding that “individual counter-terrorism investigations have taken place involving Comoran nationals in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda between 2014 and 2017, which points to Comorans’ links to East African jihadist networks.

France is also seeing the infiltration of the ‘Islamic State’ in Mayotte, a French ‘department’ located between Mozambique and Madagascar, with a deep cultural identity with the Comoros, according to the expert.

For the president of the Comoros, proximity makes cooperation between the two countries important. “We have cooperation at the level of African institutions, such as the African Union and the Southern African Development Community, but it is at the bilateral level that the two countries can solve their problems, because the problems of one are the problems of the other,” President Assoumani stressed.

Situated in the Indian Ocean at the northern end of the Mozambique Channel, the Comoros archipelago is made up of four islands: Grande-Comore, Anjouan, Moheli and Mayotte. The independence of the Union of the Comoros was decreed in 1975, with the island of Mayotte remaining under French administration.

Mozambique shares the Indian Ocean with the Comoros Islands, and the relationship between the two states has been identified by specialists and scholars as important for the protection of the Mozambique Channel.

Source: Deutsche Welle