According to local media reports militants have beheaded more than 50 people in a football ground in a village in northern Mozambique.
The attack was carried out by an ISIS-linked group in the village of Muatide in conflict-ridden Cabo Delgado province and spanned several days.
A Mozambique news agency said the assailants set fire to several villages and assembled people they’d captured from nearby forests on a single football pitch, where the victims were then decapitated and their bodies chopped to pieces, while women from the villages were abducted.
The gas-rich northern Mozambique region has witnessed several harrowing attacks involving slayings by the ISIS-affiliated local group known as Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jamo, or simply al-Shabaab locally, though they have no connection to the better known Somali group.
In another attack in April 2020, fifty-two people were either shot or decapitated after they refused to join the militant’s ranks, while in March the militants torched government buildings including police headquarters in an attack that left dozens of law enforcement officials dead.
In May 2018, at least ten people were beheaded in two villages in northern Mozambique that are close to their border with Tanzania.
The militants have targeted isolated villages over the past months as they endeavour to exercise greater influence in the area, as a result of which thousands of people have escaped.
According to a BBC report, Mozambique’s government has already sought international assistance in preparing its troops to contain the rebellion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, human rights activist tweeted that these were heinous and horrendous offences in the name of faith and ideology and that they must all unite to put an end to this totalitarian ideology that’s bereft of mercy and redemption.
International lawyer and human rights activists Hillel Neuer also voiced dismay at the incident, saying that fleeing villagers were captured, decapitated and chopped to pieces in an atrocity carried out from Friday night to Sunday.
Why has the entire world not stood together on this fight to protect lives? These people were farmers and workers and we need to have an international force to help protect them and it’s extremely difficult to comprehend this level of violence and someone should be protecting them.
This is horrendous and brutal and these perpetrators should be found and justice should be served.
The issue with this is that a bomb will be the thing that will do this and then blameless civilians will die, and then everyone will whine at the bomb droppers, but they’ll also moan if nothing is done – what would be good is if someone could bring these murders to justice.
This is utterly barbaric by an extremist militia, whereupon these poor people have to suffer and we can’t condemn a whole population for the actions of certain individuals, and there’s no depth to which the sheer depravity of these varmints will not sink to.
These are people that have been groomed and conditioned within extremist terrorist groups. These were militants, not Islamists and we should be cautious how we communicate and read things.
Not all Muslims are terrorists, but it can get a tad disconnected, especially with all the media output, and it’s about time the media called them assassins or terrorists. There’s no need to mention religion, these people are killers, full stop!
The media is helping the terrorists get more popularity and also jeopardising the lives of people in other places and what ugliness this world is with poor people being killed in such a way and evil is evil in any language.
