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Children as young as 11 are being beheaded in Mozambique, Save the Children has said, in the last country to hit by an Islamist insurgency.
The UK-based charity said it had spoken to families who described “horrible scenes” of murder, including mothers whose young children were killed.
Thousands are dead and many more magnitudes have been forced to leave their homes, as a result of the dramatic escalation of struggles that has been linked to Islamic State (IS).
A woman, named Elsa by the UK-based aid group Save the Children, in a camp for displaced people in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province.
In one case, a woman hid with three children while her other 12-year-old boy was killed nearby, Save the Children said.
The 28-year-old, whom the charity calls Elsa, is quoted as saying: “We tried to escape into the forest, but they took my oldest son and beheaded him.
“We couldn’t do anything because they would kill us too.”
Another woman, named Amelia, 29, said her son was only 11 when he was killed by gunmen.
Spokespersons for the Mozambique Police and the government have yet to be reached for comment.
the Biden The administration declared the Mozambican Islamist group a foreign terrorist organization last week, in part because of its ties to the Islamic State.
The United States said the group reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State since 2018.
The first attack in Mozambique claimed by ISIS was in Cabo Delgado in June 2019.
The region, in the far north of the country, has been plagued by insurgency since 2017. Throughout 2020, insurgents repeatedly engaged the military to capture and control key cities.
While beheadings have always been a hallmark of attacks, brutality and mass killings have worsened, including the killing of around 52 people at a time in Xitaxi village in April last year.
So far, nearly 2,700 people from all sides have died in the violence, according to the consultancy Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).
Almost 670,000 people have been displaced, according to Save the Children.
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Thousands flee Islamists in Mozambique
The US embassy in Mozambique said Monday that US special forces will train Mozambican marines and provide medical and communications equipment to help Mozambique defeat the insurgency.
It comes just a few months after the US military said that all of its troops had been withdrawn from Somalia, further north in East Africa, where the government has been fighting. Al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab militants.
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Drone captures the destruction of the cyclone
Amnesty International said in early March that all parties to the Mozambique conflict were committing war crimes and that government forces were also responsible for abuses against civilians, a charge that the government has denied.
Chance Briggs, Save the Children’s country director in Mozambique, said the latest reports of attacks on children “make us sick to the core.”
He added: “The violence has to stop and displaced families need to be supported to find their way and recover from the trauma.”
The insurgency is produced as a result of a COVID pandemic that has hit the country A severe and devastating cyclone in 2019 that left tens of thousands of people homeless.
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