At least 51 children, mostly girls, were abducted in 2020 by jihadist groups that have terrorized northeastern Mozambique for more than three years, according to the NGO Save the Children.
“Child abduction has become a new tactic, which is used terribly often by armed groups involved in the conflict,” the group said in a press release today, noting that the number represented only cases that had been recorded.
Save the Children bases its analysis in part on data collected from January 2020 to January 2021 by the American non-governmental organization ACLED, which systematically monitors armed conflict.
Organizations generally referred to as al-Shebab (“youth” in Arabic) have intensified their attacks in the impoverished Muslim-majority province of Campo Delgado, bordering Tanzania.
They set fire to villages, behead men, and kidnap to recruit new members or enslave sex slaves.
In late March, a family of four fled Palma, a city that became the target of a large-scale attack with dozens of dead to escape, but was abducted by gunmen on the street, Save the Children reports.
The jihadists separated the parents from their daughters and locked the family members in “separate” houses, the mother, 42, said.
“Later, they came back and took the daughters they were interested in,” he added. The parents managed to find their three children and escape; but they never saw their 14-year-old daughter again.
“Prior to 2020, there were no homicides or targeted child abductions,” Save the Children said, adding that it had no way of estimating how many of the abducted children could escape or how many are still missing.
Jihadist violence in the region has claimed the lives of at least 2,800 people and forced more than 700,000 others to be displaced, including 364,000 minors, according to the NGO and the UN.
