The southern African nation of Mozambique has seen a direct increase in terrorism and terrorist-type attacks throughout the year at the hands of Islamic militants.
This past week, two incidents took place that cost the lives of twelve people.
In the first case, ten people were murdered in the village of Mbau, in Mocimbao da Praia district, and half of the homes in the locality were burned down, followed by a gun battle that went into the early hours of the morning.
“They entered the village and came across a group of young people who were drinking alcohol. Many were killed,” the official, Assane Issa, told AFP. “The villagers then fled into the forest.” (source)
Then further south, in the village of Mindumbe, Islamic terrorists came upon two men who were working in the fields, attacked them, and beheaded them.
“The rebels came across two men in their fields — they killed them and then decapitated them,” a villager told AFP.
The conflict in Mozambique has been going on for at least two years, and at least 300 civilians have been killed and tens of thousands of people have fled their homes as a result of the fighting. The terrorist, which are claiming to be a part of ISIS, has recently claimed responsibility for several attacks.
What is interesting is that ISIS, which is in the Middle East and given her supposed hatred of Israel, has never so much managed as to walk the fifty-or-so miles from her position in Syria to the Israeli border, but will make the 4436 mile journey to the northernmost point of Mozambique, a distance almost equal to driving from the northernmost point of Maine on the Canadian border to just over the Nicaraguan border into Costa Rica.
Mozambique shares a border with Zimbabwe, a country that China has been going into for platinum mining, as we have written about in the Shoebat archives. Likewise, she shares a border with South Africa, a nation that is critical to US and European geopolitical mining interests, and which also has experienced a sharp increase in violence.
Terrorism is a problem everywhere, but one must not forget that terrorism is often times an extension of public policy, and it does not make sense that terrorists would refuse to travel a short distance to attack a nation they claim to hate, but will travel a third of the globe to an area that also happens to be in US geopolitical interests to wage a conflict there.