MOZAMBIQUE

Rwandan soldiers helped government troops deal a blow to the country’s Islamist insurgency Sunday, retaking Mocímboa da Praia, a port town immediately south of major natural gas deposits. The militants, known as al-Shabab, had captured the town in August 2020 as part of an offensive in the northern Cabo Delgado province. Mocímboa da Praia’s fall sharpened world attention to the burgeoning insurgency and the threat it posed to the multibillion-dollar gas development nearby. The national army’s failure to kick out the militants exposed its deficits, and Kigali dispatched a 1,000-strong contingent in response to the Mozambican president’s request for outside assistance. The Southern African Development Community also sent a force Monday. Crisis Group expert Comfort Ero says the military campaign is important but unlikely to root out the insurgency without a complementary political initiative. Al-Shabab professes an Islamist ideology, and includes foreign jihadists in its leadership, but its rank and file are youth from Cabo Delgado alienated by their exclusion from economic opportunity amid the province’s resource boom.

SOUTH SUDAN

Fighting appears to have ended between loyalists of Vice President Riek Machar and a splinter of his Southern People’s Liberation Movement/Army-Independent Opposition (SPLM/A-IO) that sought to remove him as party head. Both sides claim to have prevailed in the gun battles, which took place near South Sudan’s northern border, and the dissident camp does not seem dislodged. The SPLM/A-IO was the main rebel group in the lethal civil war that broke out in the country two years after its independence from Sudan in 2011. In 2018, Machar signed an accord with the other major SPLM/A faction led by President Salva Kiir; the two men now oversee a unity government in Juba. Machar accused the breakaway SPLM/A-IO officers of trying to derail the peace process. Crisis Group expert Alan Boswell says the split has loomed for months. Machar has fallen out with several of his senior commanders amid extreme discontent in the SPLM/A-IO with the unity government’s failure to fulfil most of the peace deal’s provisions.