Nearly 60,000 people have fled Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province in two weeks, a United Nations agency has said, amid a years-long rebellion by fighters affiliated with ISIL (ISIS).
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a statement on Tuesday that escalating attacks that began on July 20 had displaced 57,034 people, or 13,343 families.
Chiúre was the hardest-hit district, with more than 42,000 people uprooted, more than half of them children, the IOM said.
“So far, around 30,000 displaced people have received food, water, shelter, and essential household items,” Paola Emerson, who heads the Mozambique branch of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told the AFP news agency.
Emerson said OCHA was preparing to step up its assistance in the coming days. “The response, however, is not yet at the scale required to meet growing needs,” she said, in a context of cuts to international aid by the United States and other countries.
“Funding cuts mean life-saving aid is being scaled back,” she added. The UN’s 2025 Humanitarian Response Plan for Mozambique has so far received only 19 percent of the pledges requested.
The organisation also stressed that the lack of safety and documentation, and involuntary relocations, were compounding protection risks.
The Southern African nation has been fighting a rebellion by a group known locally as al-Shabab, though with no links to the Somali fighters of a similar name, in the north for at least eight years. Rwandan soldiers have been deployed to help Mozambique fight them.
More than 6,100 people have been killed since the beginning of the insurrection, according to conflict tracker ACLED, including 364 last year, according to data from the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies.
Cabo Delgado has large offshore natural gas reserves, and the fighting caused the suspension of operations by the French company Total Energies in 2021. The French fossil fuel giant has said it hopes to re-ignite the $20bn gas project this summer.
Human Rights Watch last month said the armed group had “ramped up abductions of children”, using them as fighters or for labour or marriage. The group said recruiting or using children under the age of 15 to participate actively in hostilities constitutes a war crime.
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