CHRISTIANNEWS.COM.- Extremists linked to the Islamic State are reportedly beheading children in Mozambique, the BBC said on Wednesday. The global jihadist movement has been largely defeated in the Middle East, but the genocidal Islamist extremism it once tried to bring to Iraq and Syria is now taking place in areas of Africa.
For many years, various groups linked to al Qaeda or Islamist extremists seeped into the Sahel and Somalia. They have now spread to Mozambique and its Cabo Delgado region.
When claims that Islamic State extremists were infiltrating and taking root in Mozambique first surfaced years ago, some scoffed at the idea.
This was the same narrative that cast doubt on Boko Haram in Nigeria. In 2012, an article by The New York Times it claimed that there was no evidence that a “well-organized and ideologically coherent terrorist group called Boko Haram” existed.
But it did exist, and within two years it was not just killing thousands, it was kidnapping women and children, just like the Islamic State did in Iraq. He had soon sworn allegiance to it.
Experts from 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.
Turn them into militants
This is due to the usual tendency to turn groups linked to the Islamic State into “militants” or “insurgents”, despite methods such as beheading and targeting non-Muslim religious minorities that are more similar to the methods of the Nazis. than to insurgencies.
It now appears that the Islamic State-linked group in Mozambique, called “Al-Shabab” like a similarly named group in Somalia, is involved in the beheadings of children.
The aid agency Save the Children has said that beheadings have taken place, the BBC reported on Wednesday.
“A mother told the agency that she had to watch her 12-year-old son being killed in this way near 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.
The reports do not say why people are beheaded. Boko Haram has targeted Christians and also Muslims in mosques in its campaign.
hidden beheadings
Islamic State also massacred Sunni Muslim Bedouin tribes and massacred Shiites before turning its attention to Christians and engaging in ethnic cleansing.
The general context of the beheadings may be hidden by organizations and the media that have an interest in not wanting the conflict to be perceived as “religious”, due to the need to pretend that it is mainly the economy that drives the brutality.
The use of beheading tends to be a religious motive for Islamist groups, a stylized method of killing “infidels.”
The BBC notes that the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings described the militants’ actions as “cruel beyond words”.
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