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Twenty-year-old Sarah* sat among a group of women, clutching her four-year-old daughter, Awa, close to her chest and hoping to be ignored by the chief of the insurgent group that had captured them from their village in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost province. But he spotted her.
“There were many girls,” Sarah remembers. “Their chief distributed us. [He said], ‘you take this one, and you take this one’.”
Sarah was ‘given’ to an insurgent named Abu Mussa. That night, he raped her in her tent as her daugher watched.
“He slept with his machete, knife and gun in the same tent. He put the gun right next to where we slept,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep because I was scared he would wake up and stab me.”
Sarah’s young daughter cried as they lay terrified in the tent.
“[Abu Mussa] said, ‘why don’t you make her stop crying?’ She didn’t want to,” Sarah recalls. “And he took a knife and wanted to stab me. He told me that I didn’t really want to make her stop crying when I was trying to. But she didn’t want to stop.”
Sarah and Awa are just two of the many innocent civilians who have been caught up in the conflict in Cabo Delgado that has been raging since 2017, when Islamic-State-affiliated insurgents began attacking towns across the province.
The violence has been linked both to religious extremism and Cabo Delgado’s coveted natural resources, which include vast quantities of natural gas and precious gemstones.
The conflict has been devastating to women and girls, with the insurgents – known as al-Shabaab – taking them captive to be used as sex slaves, married to fighters, or trafficked over international borders. The group has kidnapped and enslaved more than 600 girls since 2018, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW).
There have also been widespread reports of Mozambican government soldiers raping and sexually assaulting women and girls, although the government has repeatedly denied any human rights abuses.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has documented high levels of violence against women in Cabo Delgado. In the first four months of 2021 alone, the organization provided counselling to more…
