Cabo Delgado's Resource Wealth Fuels Islamist Insurgency Amid Corruption and Abuse

Cabo Delgado sits at the northern edge of Mozambique, a province so rich in rubies, timber, and natural gas that it should be among the country's wealthiest regions. Instead, it remains the poorest. The average person there lives on less than a dollar a day. Sixty-one percent of the population cannot read. Nearly half of all children are chronically malnourished. For almost a decade, an armed group calling itself Al-Shabab has waged war across this landscape of contradiction—vast resource wealth alongside grinding poverty—and the connection between the two is no accident.

The violence began in earnest in October 2017, when attackers struck police stations in the coastal town of Mocimboa da Praia, killing around fifteen people. But the seeds had been planted years earlier. In 2017, during the rainy season, thousands of artisanal miners working near Montepuez were arrested by security forces for illegal mining. Many of these garimpeiros, as they are known locally, came from outside the region. Some fled to Tanzania. Others stayed and joined the armed group that was quietly gaining strength in the bush. "From then on, it was war," one miner would later recall.

The trigger was resource extraction, but the fuel was grievance. Montepuez Ruby Mining, a subsidiary of the British company Gemfields, holds a 25-year concession covering 10,000 square kilometres of Cabo Delgado. The concession was granted in 2012, just three years after ruby deposits were discovered in the province—deposits that now account for roughly eighty percent of the world's ruby reserves. In 2019, Gemfields paid €6.7 million in compensation to 273 miners who had sued the company for human rights violations, alleging that security personnel and Mozambican forces had committed physical violence, sexual violence, degrading treatment, and killings. Gemfields acknowledged violence had occurred but denied responsibility. The abuses have not stopped. According to Aly Caetano, a human rights coordinator in Cabo Delgado, torture, illegal detention, and killings continue. Meanwhile, the road connecting Montepuez to Pemba—the provincial capital—remains among the worst in the region, a visible symbol of how little the province's wealth has been reinvested in its own infrastructure.

The timber trade tells a parallel story. Niassa Reserve, a protected area in the far north, has become a hub for trafficking in ivory and valuable timber species. In August 2020, Mozambican authorities seized 82 containers of illegally cut logs at the port of Pemba, bound for China. Four months later, sixty-six of those containers somehow cleared customs and resumed their journey. Mozambique's timber industry is dominated by Chinese operators with close ties to senior figures in Frelimo, the ruling party. One such figure is José Pacheco, a former governor of Cabo Delgado and former agriculture minister, who has documented financial connections to Chinese timber interests. In 2016 alone, Mozambican timber worth more than four hundred million dollars reached Chinese markets, yet customs authorities declared only one hundred million in exports that year.

Al-Shabab has weaponized this inequality. The group's leadership includes Maulana Ali Cassimo, a former agriculture ministry official who traveled through rural communities on a motorbike denouncing forced evictions, police brutality, and what he characterized as Maputo's theft of Cabo Delgado's wealth. The group's messaging, according to researchers, centers on foreign control of natural resources. In July 2020, the group's propaganda newspaper carried the headline: "Crusaders, beware of your investments in Mozambique." Driving foreign economic players out of the province became an explicit objective. Among those targets is the consortium developing a massive offshore gas field near Palma, containing an estimated five trillion cubic metres of reserves and led by the French energy company TotalEnergies. After years of suspension, TotalEnergies announced this year that work would resume.

The scale of the conflict's human toll is staggering. The United Nations estimates that at least one million people have been displaced. Estimates of Al-Shabab's fighting strength vary wildly—the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center counted around three hundred militants in 2025, while the International Crisis Group estimated three thousand in 2020. What is certain is that a decade of war has hollowed out entire communities, and that the insurgency continues to draw recruits from a population that has watched its province's immense wealth flow outward while their own circumstances deteriorate. The investigation into these dynamics—conducted by thirty journalists from ten media organizations over five months and nearly one hundred interviews—is the first installment of a larger project called Mozambique Exposed. It reveals not a simple story of terrorism, but a more complex one: how the extraction and mismanagement of resources, combined with documented abuses by both security forces and private companies, created the conditions in which an armed group could position itself as an alternative to a system that had failed its people.