More than 500,000 people have been displaced from a ruby and oil-rich region of Mozambique in what the UN has called “a perfect storm of instability”.
The people of Cabo Delgado, the country’s northernmost province, are dealing with an insurgency by Islamist militants, food insecurity, extreme weather, disease and government failures.
Reliable information is severely lacking from the region as journalists face intimidation, with two local reporters held for months in a military prison in 2019, while international media has been refused permission to enter.
As Sky’s Africa John Sparks reports, the crisis has gone largely unnoticed by the rest of the world.
This is what is happening.
Who are Ansar al-Sunna and when did the insurgency begin?
In 2017, a group calling itself Ansar al-Sunna (translation: supporters of the tradition) started carrying out attacks on government and civilian targets in Cabo Delgado, a province rich in rubies and oil and with a population that is 54% Muslim – whereas most of Mozambique is Christian.
The group was reportedly formed in 2015 by followers of the radical Muslim Kenyan cleric Aboud Rogo Mohammed, who resettled in Mozambique after his death in 2012.
Mozambicans call them Al-Shabaab, but they are not the same as the terror group in Somalia.
Ansar al-Sunna want to establish an Islamic state in the region and claim the Islam practised in Mozambique has been corrupted and no longer follows Muhammad’s teachings.
Its members, which have grown to the thousands, have tried preventing people from going to hospitals or schools as they consider them secular and anti-Islamic.
Mozambicans make up the majority of their…
Read the full article at news.sky.com
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