Insurgents have beheaded civilians in summary executions and left homes, schools and health centers destroyed. The rapid rise of the insurgency - which has swelled from a few dozen fighters in 2017 to as many as 800 militants today - has been as shocking as the campaign of violence the militants have unleashed. Over the past three years, the war between militants and government security forces in Cabo Delgado province has left at least 2,000 people dead and 670,000 more displaced, in one of the region’s worst humanitarian crises. The siege that began on Wednesday afternoon was a stunning escalation of the conflict in northeastern Mozambique by insurgent groups with ties to the Islamic State, which has made alarming inroads and sent waves of violence across the African continent in recent years. The violence sent thousands of people fleeing, with some rushing to the beach, where a ragtag fleet of cargo ships, tugboats and fishing vessels was ferrying people to safety.īut at the hotel, with daylight hours dwindling, the local residents and foreign gas workers who remained faced an impossible choice: Either wait inside, defenseless, for a promised evacuation in the morning, or try to make it to the beach. JOHANNESBURG - As gunshots rang out across a port town in northeastern Mozambique on Friday afternoon, nearly 200 people sheltering inside the Amarula Palma hotel confronted a devastating reality: The armed insurgents outside the hotel’s doors had all but taken control of the town and there was no one coming to save them any time soon.įor two days, hundreds of insurgents in the gas-rich region had been laying siege to the coastal town of Palma, firing indiscriminately at civilians, hunting down government officials and setting buildings ablaze as security forces tried in vain to repel them.
0 kommentar(er)
