YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – A jihadist campaign mostly targeting Christians in northern Mozambique is being overlooked amid the global focus on the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
“The biggest risk is that [the victims] will be forgotten due to other wars in the world,” said Bishop António Juliasse Ferreira Sandramo of Pemba in the northern Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique.
The bishop described that in his own diocese whole villages have been destroyed, causing thousands of people to flee.
Amid spiralling violence and what he describes as a “population exodus”, Juliasse said that missionaries are joining the fleeing population in an effort to minister to their needs in exile.
According to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration, a new outbreak of a jihadist insurgency in Cabo Delgado has uprooted at least 14,000 people, many of them children, in recent weeks, with people fleeing by bus, canoe and on foot. Much of the violence has been directed against Christians. About 60 per cent of the country’s population are Christian.
“The violence perpetrated in this district in the last two weeks was such that around a dozen villages, some very populous, were targeted, with the destruction of homes and institutions,” Juliasse said. “In these villages, all Christian chapels were destroyed.”
The 55-year-old bishop noted that many people flee carrying just “a bundle on their head or on the only family bicycle,” adding:
“It’s all they have left now. It will certainly not be long before hunger, thirst and disease arrive.”
He said they are fleeing for their lives, afraid to suffer “the same fate as those who were beheaded and shot”, and highlighted individual tragedies among the mass movements.
The fresh wave of attacks comes after Mozambican authorities, with assistance from Rwandan troops and an African military coalition, initially appeared to have brought the situation under control. In mid-December, the Mozambican military claimed that 90 per cent of Cabo Delgado had been secured, but independent analysts warned that the jihadists had merely made a tactical withdrawal and would strike back.
According to UNHCR, at least two million people had been forced to flee from their homes since fighting broke out in the region in 2017. At least 5,000 people have been killed.
The European Commission estimates that some 3.5 million people are now facing the prospect of acute food insecurity in northern Mozambique.
On 18 February 2024, Pope Francis addressed the situation in Mozambique and the suffering of its population in his Angelus prayer.
Photo: People flee violence in Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique, October 2023. (Credit: Igor Barbero/Doctors Without Borders via AP/Crux.)
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