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More than 1,000 survivors of a deadly attack last week in the northern Mozambique city of Palma have reached the port of Pemba safely by boat, some of them crying upon arrival after spending days hiding in the forest.
Aid workers were in the busy port of the provincial capital Cabo Delgado Thursday to feed displaced people disembarking from the green and white ferry. Police and soldiers maintained control of the crowds of people excited to see their relatives, while others remained desperate with no news.
An emotional Mariamo Tagir, who arrived on the ferry, said that she had spent seven days in the bush, crying every day. “I don’t know where my son is … it is very painful,” Tagir told the Reuters news agency. “The situation is really bad, many deaths.”
A woman dressed in a blue denim apron and a pink mask sat on the ground in the harbor, staring blankly, one hand clutching a fence, waiting for her child. Another woman comforted her as she burst into sobs, according to the AFP news agency.
The Mozambican government has confirmed the deaths of dozens of “defenseless” civilians in the March 24 raid in Palma, which marked the dramatic escalation of an armed campaign that has wreaked havoc in gas-rich Cabo Delgado since 2017.
Palma is home to some 110,000 people, according to United Nations estimates, including some 40,000 internally displaced people who had settled there after fleeing attacks by ISIL-linked fighters elsewhere. The area adjacent to the city is home to several multi-million dollar natural gas projects.
As of Wednesday afternoon, a tracker for the UN migration agency showed that more than 8,100 people had been displaced, nearly half of them children. About 20 percent had arrived in Pemba, and others had shown up in the districts of Mueda, Montepuez, and Nangade in Cabo Delgado.
However, the full scale of victims and displacements remains unclear. Most of the media was cut off after the attack began.
Aid groups believe the attack has displaced tens of thousands of people. Hundreds, including many foreign workers, have been evacuated by air.
Unfortunately, there is no “sense of normalcy,” Juliana Ghazi of the UN refugee agency told AFP.
Thousands of displaced
The ferry, organized by Total in coordination with the Mozambican government and the UN, docked around 8 am local time (06:00 GMT) in Pemba.
Total, which has a gas project on the Afungi peninsula near Palma, said in a statement that there were almost 1,200 passengers on board, mainly women and children.
A humanitarian official said the government was screening those arriving in Pemba to prevent infiltration by armed groups.
Military operations were underway on Wednesday, according to footage filmed by local news station TVM, showing soldiers carrying rocket-propelled grenades and weapons in the area, as well as reinforcements arriving by helicopter.
“I cannot say now that we have the entire town under control,” army spokesman Chongo Vidigal said in the pictures, adding that the security forces, however, had a presence in the port area.
The African Union (AU) has called for coordinated international action to jointly address the “urgent threat to regional and continental peace and security.”
In a statement, the president of the African Union, Moussa Faki Mahamat, expressed his “utmost concern” about the presence of international groups in southern Africa, and called for “urgent and coordinated regional and international action.”
The regional Southern African Development Community (SADC) held emergency talks in the Zimbabwean capital Harare on Wednesday to discuss the violence.
Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi promised regional aid but did not give details. He said that the “integrity and sovereignty” of SADC member states must be assured and must be protected from attack.
But Mozambique President Filipe Nyusi dismissed the attack as “not the biggest.”
The fighters are known locally as al-Shabab, but have no known affiliation with the armed group of the same name in Somalia. Last week, the United States declared Mozambique’s rebels a “terrorist” group and announced that 12 military trainers had been deployed to assist Marines in the southern African country.
Portugal, Mozambique’s former colonial power, announced Tuesday that it is stepping up its military cooperation by sending 60 soldiers to help train Mozambique’s special forces.
Before last week’s attack, the escalation of the conflict had killed more than 2,600 people, half of them civilians, and forced almost 700,000 from their homes.
Human rights groups say that fighters in Cabo Delgado have carried out summary executions, beheadings, village raids, looting and destruction of infrastructure, including schools and medical facilities. Government forces have also been implicated in serious human rights abuses during operations in the province, including arbitrary arrests, torture, misuse of force against civilians, and extrajudicial executions.
Last month, the global rights watchdog Amnesty International accused the fighters, government security forces and private military companies of “war crimes.”
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