June 24. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Mozambican Army has claimed to have repelled an attack carried out on Thursday by alleged jihadists against the town of Nkoe, located in the north of the country and which is home to hundreds of internally displaced by violence in the province of Cabo Delgado.
Sources quoted by the US radio station Voice of America have detailed that the assailants broke into Nkoe at 6:00 am (local time) and set fire to twelve structures, although at the moment there is no information on fatalities.
“First they entered opening fire and the population fled into the bushes and then they started burning houses,” said a survivor. The town is home to hundreds of people displaced by two recent attacks in Ancuabe, located in the south of Cabo Delgado.
The governor of Cabo Delgado, Valige Tauaubo, acknowledged on Wednesday an increase in instability in some districts previously considered safe due to the expansion of the operations of the jihadists, linked to the Islamic State in Central Africa (ISCA).
In this sense, he recalled that the attackers broke into villages in the Ancuabe district on June 5, forcing the population to “take refuge” and “seek safer places,” which unleashed a wave of internally displaced persons in recent weeks.
Cabo Delgado has been the scene since October 2017 of attacks by Islamist militiamen known as Al Shabaab, unrelated to the homonymous group that operates in Somalia and maintains ties with Al Qaeda. Since mid-2019 they have been mostly claimed by ISCA, which has intensified its actions since March 2020.
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