By Tiago J.B. paqueliua
‘Terrorism in Mozambique and all its related forms will not end as long as terrorists – domestic or jihadist – continue to believe that committing war crimes paves the way for luxury talks, followed by amnesty, and finally a DDR without retributive justice.’
Macomia, once a land of fishing and hope, has become synonymous with a mass grave, a sinister altar where the Mozambican state immolates its dignity and the people sacrifice the last vestiges of hope. The dawn of 28 June 2025 (02 Dhul-Hijjah 1446) served as another chapter in the ongoing tragedy, when the Islamic State claimed the killing of at least 30 soldiers from the Mozambique Armed Defence Forces (FADM) in Quiterajo – as reported by Carta de Moçambique and the Cabo Ligado Weekly Report of 5 July 2025.
Of course, the Mozambican authorities – those virtuous masters of deafening silence – preferred not to confirm or deny it. Because in Mozambique, you only confirm or deny what the propaganda orders and the palace authorises. The truth, at best, is an occasional luxury.
All that is known is that the dead soldiers were part of a battalion of recent graduates in Nacala-Porto, trained with Rwandan support. A detail that, more than geopolitical, is ironic: young men prepared to defend the people have become fresh meat in a jihadist slaughterhouse. In Quiterajo, they died – as state authority dies: quickly, in silence, without glory and without justice.
But perhaps more disturbing than the attack is the reaction of the people of the Northern Operational Theatre (TON), who, according to local voices, are not mourning the fall of the military – some are even breathing a sigh of relief. After all, they are the same people who accuse the FADM of perpetrating crimes as heinous as those of the terrorists themselves. The echoes of the massacre of around 100 fishermen in Pangane, attributed to the military, still resonate in consciences and in the videos documented by Integrity Mozambique (07/07/2025), where civilians report unspeakable atrocities, while bodies are piled into lorries on their way to the Macomia health centre.
What kind of state is this, where the victim and the executioner are confused and the uniform becomes the ideal disguise for terror?
A New Typology of Terrorism in Cabo Delgado: The Case of Macomia
As if plundering lives wasn’t enough, the regime has trained its forces to persecute… journalists. As has become their wont, on 26 June 2025, 16 Mozambican reporters were interrogated, threatened, searched and had their equipment confiscated by the Defence and Security Forces (FDS), simply for filming the rubble of destroyed huts – visual testimonies of what the regime wants to bury with silence. The complaint came from MISA-Mozambique, which dares to be one of the few bastions of informative dignity.
It seems that the FADM confuse the camera lens with a kalashnikov’s scope. Journalist has become synonymous with ‘agent of the enemy’.
After all, those who film the truth threaten institutionalised lies. How can these forces be expected to protect villages if they tremble in front of a GoPro?
And what about the people? These people, who are already displaced from their citizenship, refugees in their own land, are the target of two types of terrorism: jihadist, who use kalashnikovs just like them, and state terrorism to foment terror.
As OCHA/UN rightly points out in its report of 7 July 2025, the situation in the north is a growing disaster: 48,000 displaced since January, 260,000 without access to drinking water, 200,000 without decent shelter, and a 26% drop in humanitarian aid funding. Emergency programmes are being closed down, not for lack of need, but for lack of shame at the top of the pyramid.
And there are still those who have the nerve to say that everything is ‘under control’ in Macomia, when in fact it is nothing more than a
microcosm of the bankruptcy of the Mozambican state, which legislates for itself, which turns parliament into an incubator for perks and universal suffrage into an instrument of political exclusion, a country where crime pays and where terrorism, far from being fought, is instead recycled, negotiated and promoted to the category of political interlocutor.
The war is no longer against terrorism – it’s against the truth.
The FADM seem more adept at targeting fishermen than protecting civilians. Journalists are treated as dissidents for showing what is really going on. And politicians in Maputo are too busy preparing for indirect elections to notice that the country is dying.
Epilogue:
As long as terror has a passport and Parliament represents the interests of parties and not the people, Mozambique will continue to sink – and not into any abyss, but into an abyss worse than any hell imaginable. If it were worse.
Terror no longer lives only in the forests. It’s in parliament, in the barracks, in the courts, in gagged newsrooms, in displacement camps, in the manipulated pages of official newspapers. Here, the line between criminal and ruler is blurred, as is the difference between terrorist and soldier, journalist and enemy of the state. We are in an apocalyptic cycle where the warlords of tomorrow are gestated, nurtured and forgiven by the very state that should be fighting them if it were, in fact, a state.
And as long as war crimes are not prevented, investigated, judged and justly condemned in Mozambique, and as a result of this, the former bandits continue to benefit from luxurious talks, amnesties for convenience, Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes with state political and economic status full of perks, security paid for by the treasury, honorary university degrees and international awards, terrorism – under other names, uniforms and parties – will always exist.
Sources Consulted:
- Letter from Mozambique, ‘Islamic State claims death of 30 soldiers in Macomia’, 5 July 2025.
- Cabo Ligado Weekly Report, July 2025.
- Integrity Mozambique, ‘Military accused of killing fishermen in Pangane’, 7 July 2025.
- Carta de Moçambique, ‘FDS intimidate journalists in Macomia’, 7 July 2025.
- OCHA/UN, ‘Humanitarian Crisis in Northern Mozambique’, 7 July 2025.
- MISA-Mozambique, ‘Letter to the Minister of National Defence’, June-July 2025.
