ISIS in Mozambique ‘beheading’ children, reports say “One mother told the agency she had had to watch as her 12-year-old son was killed in this way close to where she was hiding with her other children.”
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/isis-in-mozambique-beheading-children-reports-
ISIS-linked extremists are reportedly beheading children in Mozambique, the BBC claimed on Wednesday.
The global jihadist movement has largely been defeated in the Middle East, but the genocidal Islamist extremism that it once sought to bring to Iraq and Syria is now being carried out in areas in Africa. For many years, various groups linked to Al Qaeda or Islamist extremists percolated across the Sahel and in Somalia. They have now spread down to Mozambique and its Cabo Delgado region.
When claims of ISIS extremists infiltrating and taking root in Mozambique first appeared years ago, some scoffed at the notion. This was the same narrative that cast doubt on Boko Haram in Nigeria. In 2012 an article at The New York Times claimed that there was no proof that a “well-organized, ideologically coherent terrorist group called Boko Haram even exists.”
But exist it did – and within two years it was not only murdering thousands but was kidnapping women and children, much as ISIS did in Iraq. Soon it had pledged allegiance to ISIS.
Experts across the Sahel and Central Africa, most of them European, tend to see the conflicts as linked to economic or “tribal” issues and try to deny that religion plays a role. This is because of the usual tendency to turn ISIS-linked groups into “militants” or “insurgents,” despite methods like beheading and targeting of religious non-Muslim minorities that are more similar to the methods of the Nazis than insurgencies.
It now appears that the ISIS-linked group in Mozambique, called “Al-Shabab” like a similarly named group in Somalia, is involved in the beheadings of children. Aid agency “Save the Children” has said that the beheadings have taken place, the BBC reported Wednesday.
“One mother told the agency she had had to watch as her 12-year-old son was killed in this way close to where she was hiding with her other children. More than 2,500 people have been killed and 700,000 have fled their homes since an Islamist insurgency began in 2017,” the reports say.
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