Jihadists threaten Mozambique’s new gasfields

MANY KINDSFRELIMORENAMO of misfortune make a country prone to conflict; Mozambique has them all. It is poor. , its ruling party, is predatory and corrupt. Much of its vast territory is barely governed at all. It has a recent history of civil war: a 15-year inferno that ended in 1992 and cost perhaps 1m lives, and a milder six-year uprising involving the same rebel group, , which formally ended last year. Into this explosive mix, two blazing matches have been tossed: jihadist terror and the discovery of natural gas.As we report this week, a poorly understood insurgency is spreading in Cabo Delgado, a province in northern Mozambique (see ). So far the conflict has killed more than 1,000 people, aid workers estimate, and forced at least 100,000 to flee their homes. Recent weeks have seen some of the boldest attacks yet. Young men with guns and Islamist slogans are not merely burning villages and beheading people. They have also started to capture towns, albeit temporarily, slaughtering government forces and then retreating to the bush.