Jihadism in Mozambique: southern African forces are leaving with mixed results
Retrieved on:
Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Mozambican security forces will then take full responsibility for security.
Key Points:
- Mozambican security forces will then take full responsibility for security.
- We asked military science and defence expert Thomas Mandrup, who has published a paper on the situation after a recent ground visit, to evaluate the mission.
Why did the military mission in Mozambique intervene?
- SADC member states had been putting pressure on the Mozambican government to allow a regional military intervention to prevent the insurgency from spreading in the region.
- Their fear was that Islamic State (Isis), to which the extremists are affiliated, would get a bridgehead from which they could expand their operations.
- Read more:
Offshore gas finds offered major promise for Mozambique: what went wrongThe SADC decided to deploy a combined force of 2,210 troops.
How successful was the mission? What were the challenges?
The SADC military mission had several main strategic objectives:
neutralising the extremists
assisting the Mozambique Defence Armed Forces in planning and undertaking operations
training and advising the Mozambique forces.
- An internal assessment report was presented at the July 2023 meeting of the then SADC leadership troika (Zambia, Namibia and South Africa).
- It concluded that the SADC mission had achieved its objective of reducing the insurgents’ capacity and assisting the Mozambican military.
- In addition, 570,000 internally displaced people had returned to their homes by August 2023, as the security situation had improved.
- Samim has found it difficult to fulfil its mandate of training the Mozambican force because they couldn’t identify their training needs.
What lessons can be learnt from the operation?
- And it must understand the area and situation it’s being deployed into.
- The Mozambican government and military have not always worked with the mission.
why was its response so slow and insufficient?
why did it oppose regional involvement for so long?
why has the SADC mission at times found it difficult to strike at the core of the insurgents?
- During my recent fieldwork several interviewees even suggested that a faction of Frelimo had at times supported the insurgents.
- Frelimo has strong ties to the region going back to the war of independence against Portugal, and later the civil war between Renamo and Frelimo.
- The local population considered it less effective than, for instance, the Rwandan force, which was also better equipped and trained.
What needs to happen
- The risk is that the extremists will once again take a stronger foothold there since the issues that led to the conflict in the first place remain unresolved.
- In addition, the Mozambican government and its security force have shown only limited signs of improved capacity.
Thomas Mandrup receives funding from the Carlsberg Foundation