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| At the height of their control earlier this year, secretive insurgents dominated a small but important corner of Mozambique. (Map from our July 2021 Cabo Delgado update.) |
In our August 2020 Mozambique conflict map article, we discussed confusion over the name of the insurgent group operating in Cabo Delgado province. Now, a year later, we've decided it's time to briefly revisit that question.
Though the fighters have now been pushed out of their most prized territories, they're still present in the region in large numbers, so questions about their identity remain highly relevant.
Al Shabaab in Mozambique?
At this point there's no longer
much question that the group's most commonly-used name in Cabo Delgado -
by both its opponents and the insurgents themselves
- is "Al-Shabab". This unofficial name, which means "the youth" in
Arabic (the international language of the Islamic religion, but not of
everyday communication in Mozambique), appears to be a reference to
the Al Shabaab insurgent group in Somalia. Though the word is usually spelled "Shabaab" in the Somali context, and international commentary often uses this spelling for the Cabo Delgado insurgents too, local spelling conventions in Mozambique tend to prefer "Shabab" without the double A.
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