While observers of maritime traffic were focused on the destination of the cargo ship Ever Given, which clogged the Suez Canal, a different drama was taking place in the south, in the waters off Mozambique. Over the course of several days, an improvised flotilla of dozens of boats rescued thousands of people besieged by ISIS-affiliated insurgents in the city of Palma, in a feat of observers compared to the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940.
The rescue was part of a continuing collapse in the region driven by the rise of the ISIS Central African Province (IS CAP or Central Africa Wilayah). IS CAP began carrying out attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo in April 2019 and has been growing ever since. Throughout 2020, the group killed civilians in Cabo Delgado province, Mozambique, starting with the murder of 52 people who refused to join them in April 2020. Since then, the group has taken, lost and retakes the city of Mocímboa de Praia, which declared its capital. IS CAP has also managed to free more than 1,300 prisoners and seize the islands in the Indian Ocean, where celebrities previously vacationed. The violence forced 670,000 people to flee their homes and more than 7,000 lives were lost.
The French energy company Total, which operates a gas extraction unit in the province, withdrew its workers due to this threat. On March 24, Total employees returned to their hotel in Palma, a city of 75,000 inhabitants, to prepare to start work again. This sparked what appears to have been a planned attack by IS CAP affiliated Al-Shahabab militants (who are not linked to the Somali group of the same name) in the city.
The militants cut telephone lines and attacked from the north, accompanied by another column from Tanzania. A thousand government soldiers in the city were defeated and two-thirds of the city was burned while militants beheaded civilians in the streets. The task of identifying militants was made difficult because IS CAP forces wear the same uniforms as government troops, and both sides seem to like equally beheading prisoners.
Lionel Dyck – the founder of South African private security contracting firm Dyck Advisory Group (DAG) and former military colonel of Africa’s penultimate white ethnostat, Rhodesia – said his employees were the first to respond. In an interview with CNN, he said: “The situation on the ground was terrible when my pilots arrived. The first thing they saw was food trucks on the road where drivers and their assistants were pulled and beheaded. They were lying next to their cars, ”
Almost 200 people, including local and foreign Total workers, rushed to Hotel Amaarula and took shelter in the lobby. They were soon surrounded by machine guns and mortars. In the courtyard, they spelled “SOS” with white stones, hoping to get some international attention and help. Quickly, a consortium of security contractors, Total employees and the few government soldiers who had not fled began to try to rescue the people trapped in the hotel.
On March 26, the DAG sent small helicopters to rescue people in groups of four or six. After cleaning the perimeter, they evacuated about 20 guests until they ran out of fuel and ammunition. Larger Hind helicopters belonging to another company were forced to retreat by mortar and machine gun fire. The rest of the hotel guests, along with the local civilians, tried to escape to the beach, as the militants controlled all land routes out of the city. Hotel guests left in 17 vehicles, of which only seven arrived. A man, Gregory Knox, escaped carrying his son’s body.
It was then that the boats entered. When the seven SUVs containing the hotel residents arrived on the beach, along with other vehicles and local civilians on foot, they faced an uncomfortable wait, spending the night exposed and scared on a beach that the BBC reported was “strewn with bodies without a head ”. The next morning, the boats started to arrive. Up to a dozen ships have joined – “” a true heterogeneous crew of all types, “said Tim Walker, senior researcher at the Institute of Security Studies in Pretoria,” including some ferries from Tanzania, as well as recreational vessels. ”Among them were tugboats, some of which generally worked with offshore gas operations, and local dhows.
As with the legendary evacuation from Dunkirk, Walker said, smaller boats came close to the beach, then transported refugees to larger ones waiting at sea. At marinetraffic.com, small blue ships identified as “tugs and special vessels” were crawling back and forth, the ferry appeared as a green dot and the dhows were not visible. Slowly, the small blue dots began to move south in a loose formation, towards safety
“I would not describe the boats assembled as a ‘fleet’,” said Walker, “since that involves a lot more organization and planning than was the case.”
Over the course of several days, the mass rescue took about 3,000 people, taking them 155 miles south to the safe harbor of Pemba. On a loose group of 8 vessels The local website Pinnacle News reported that more than 1,300 of them were rescued by the Tanzanian Sea Star ferry, which is only 100 meters long and 25 meters wide. The photos show civilians huddled shoulder to shoulder on his deck. Other photos showed small dhows, totally overloaded and often taken without permission from their owners, according to Pinnacle.
Marinetraffic.com showed the ships that were making the voyage from the bay of Palma until Monday, March 29, and a series of tugboats, passenger and cargo ships in the port of Pemba.
For those arriving in Pemba, the ordeal is not over yet. This route to the south has been used for months as the insurgency in Cabo Delgado has grown, “tragedies are common,” said Walker. “For example, in October 2020, more than 40 people, many of them children, drowned after an overcrowded ship sank while sailing to Pemba.”
So far, none of Palma’s rescue boats have sunk, but some refugees have faced a three-day journey during which they have had no access to drinking water. Local government officials forced them to remain on their boats for inspection before allowing them to enter the city. Journalists’ access was limited by the government of Mozambique.
The government has good reason to limit journalistic access. Although DAG mercenaries were instrumental in rescuing civilians in Palma, they were not always so kind to non-combatants. Fifty-three witnesses in the region told Amnesty International that “DAG agents fired machine guns from helicopters and launched hand grenades indiscriminately at crowds of people, as well as repeatedly firing at civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and homes.” Government forces have also been documented torturing and beheading prisoners, according to Amnesty International. Official sources rejected the allegations, saying that “” One of the tactics used by terrorists in their macabre forays against the population is to pretend to be elements of the FDS (Defense and Security Forces) in a veiled attempt to confuse the national and international public opinion, “
Security contractors and the Mozambique SDS tried to retake Palma on March 31, but in an interview Lionel Dyck said “” While sitting here, Palma is lost. Unless something happens, they’ve lost Palma. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch called for greater transparency on the part of the government, which continues to deny access to reporters or to allow questions to be asked at its press conferences in Palma, Hundreds are still missing and up to 10,000 are still awaiting rescue.
Walker says maintaining control of the coast is vital to limiting the tragedy that unfolds in Palma: “The best available escape route, as well as the only viable way to provide aid to the growing number of internally displaced people, is to gain and maintain control of the coast and help the communities of the sea. “
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