Islamists target northern Mozambique – especially the children

Musa was eating dinner with his wife and three children at their farm in northern Mozambique when the rattle of gunfire in the distance suddenly broke the calm. 

On that February evening, he knew immediately what was happening: His village was under attack by Islamist militants. They would likely kill or enslave anyone they managed to catch, and then burn the homes and farms they left behind. 

Musa – who uses that pseudonym for his safety – did the only thing he could think of. He ran, joining a panicked throng taking cover in a nearby forest. 

Only after the chaotic escape did he make a horrifying discovery: His 8-year-old son, Ismael, was not with him. 

Since 2017, a group of extremist militants pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) has waged a fierce terror campaign in Mozambique’s northernmost province, Cabo Delgado. Around 6,000 people have died in the fighting, and more than a million have been displaced. This year alone, 100,000 people have fled their homes. Some 60,000 of them are children, deepening the trauma of a generation that has grown up in the shadow of a brutal guerilla war that is largely invisible to the outside world. 

Each of those children has a story. This is the story of Ismael and his father Musa. 

A desperate search

Ismael – also using a pseudonym – was only 1 year old in 2017, when news of a strange new wave of terror attacks began to arrive at his parents’ farm in Chiúre, a farming region in the south of Cabo Delgado. Young men would enter nearby villages at night, spray them with bullets, and take prisoners. They called themselves Al Shabab – or “the youth” in Arabic – and claimed to be waging a holy war to establish an Islamic government in Cabo Delgado.

The militants – loosely affiliated with ISIS – were angry at having watched Mozambique’s government fail to develop the region for decades, even as privileged locals and foreigners grew rich extracting its rubies, graphite, gold, and timber. Over the next few years, the insurgency spread through the poor and isolated province.

In 2021, the conflict made international headlines when insurgents captured the town of Palma, the site of a $20 billion natural gas project. Foreign troops soon restored the peace, but late last year, Al Shabab began a fresh wave of attacks in sparsely guarded areas in the south of Cabo Delgado. 

All along, Musa knew that his young son was particularly at risk. Al Shabab specifically targeted schools, and as its support among local people dwindled, the group often kidnapped young boys to serve as fighters. 

So when the war arrived at Musa’s doorstep on that day in February, he feared the worst for Ismael. After the attack, he fled south on foot to Eráti, a town in the neighboring province of Nampula. As he traveled, he made panicked calls to friends and neighbors. Over and over he heard the same thing: “Sorry. We ran for our lives, too. We didn’t see Ismael.”

Musa wasn’t the only parent frantically searching. UNICEF registered nearly 200 cases of children separated from their parents in Chiúre. 

But he was fortunate. Three days after he arrived in Eráti, Musa got word that some neighbors had found Ismael in the frightened crowd fleeing into the forest, and had taken him with them. 

Recalling the moment he saw Ismael again, Musa says the joy was nearly impossible to describe. “I recovered everything,” he says simply.

Stay or go? 

But displacement took other tolls on his family. Living in a small town overflowing with uprooted people like themselves, they did not have enough to eat, and they couldn’t work.

With much of the world’s attention and money focused on crises in places like Gaza and Ukraine, “the funding [for displaced people] is not enough, and the presence of [humanitarian] actors is low” in northern Mozambique, says Ulrika Blom, country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council. Aid workers are stretched thin in a remote province roughly the size of Maine with few paved roads, where insurgents still roam freely. 

That lack of support drives many displaced people back to their villages, even when the threat of violence still looms.“They say that they prefer to die at home in the attacks instead of dying in the displacement camps,” says Tomás Queface, who heads Cabo Ligado, an organization monitoring the conflict.

And so, a little more than a week after he fled, Musa and his family made the return journey, heading for the house in Chiúre he’d built by hand.  

“Home is home,” he says. “Whenever you need something, you can ask your neighbors and they will help you. Being away from here is like being in a foreign country.”

But he found Chiúre transformed. His chickens and ducks were gone. The burned-out husk of a truck set aflame by the insurgents sat on the road leading to his farm. 

Musa also watched how somber and timid Ismael and his friends had become, drained of the innocence they had displayed before the fighting in their village. 

“They don’t play as they used to, because now they’re aware that there’s a war,” he says.

More than 100 schools in Cabo Delgado and neighboring Nampula have shut down because of the conflict, disrupting classes for 50,000 children, according to the latest figures from UNICEF. Ismael is studying, Musa says, but many of his classmates are afraid to go back to school.

This is common in Cabo Delgado, says Lindsay Shearer, a child protection specialist for UNICEF in the province. After seeing schools destroyed, “it takes time for [children] to build trust again and feel safe.”

When a Monitor reporter met Musa in March, just a few weeks after the family’s return home, he and Ismael were taking their new life one day at a time. 

“Every night when you go to bed, you say thank you to God that you survived the day. They didn’t find us. They didn’t come,” he says. 

Then, in late April, Al Shabab forces attacked Chiúre once more, burning 50 homes and beheading a man. Musa longs for a normal life. “We are crying for an end to the war, crying for an end to the war, so that we can relax,” he says.

Reporting for this story was supported by Oxfam.