Maputo Promised Riches From Offshore Gas. Cabo Delgado Got a War Instead.

On the morning of March 24, 2021, Amina Hassane was cooking breakfast when she heard the first gunshots. They came from the direction of the main road into Palma, the small coastal town in northern Mozambique where she had lived for seventeen years. By noon, insurgents from what the government calls al-Shabaab — no relation to the Somali group — had overrun the police station, the bank, and the TotalEnergies compound where her husband worked as a security guard. By evening, he was dead. She had not seen his body. She had run.

Amina walked south for three days with her two daughters, ages nine and eleven. They slept in the bush. On the second day, they passed a Land Cruiser that had been stopped on the road and burned. There were bodies inside. On the third day, they reached a displacement camp outside Pemba, the provincial capital, where 87,000 people were already living in tents. A registration officer from the International Organization for Migration gave her a plastic card with a number on it. She has been there ever since.

Five years later, Amina is one of 946,000 people displaced by an insurgency that has killed at least 5,680 civilians, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. The war has no clear ideology beyond local grievance and opportunism. It has no recognizable leadership structure that outsiders can negotiate with. And it exists, most analysts agree, because Mozambique discovered something it could not protect: 180 trillion cubic feet of natural gas buried beneath the Rovuma Basin, worth an estimated $60 billion to the companies that want to extract it.

The Discovery That Changed Nothing

Cabo Delgado has always been Mozambique's forgotten province. During the liberation war against Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s, Frelimo — the Mozambique Liberation Front — recruited heavily from the region. After independence in 1975, Frelimo governed from Maputo, 1,700 miles to the south. Cabo Delgado remained poor, underdeveloped, and politically marginal. In 2010, when Anadarko Petroleum discovered the gas fields offshore, the province had a per capita income of $237 a year. It had one paved road. In some districts, fewer than 30 percent of children attended school.

TotalEnergies, the French oil giant, acquired Anadarko's stake in 2019 and immediately began construction of a $20 billion liquefied natural gas facility on the Afungi Peninsula, just south of Palma. The Mozambican government promised jobs, infrastructure, and prosperity. Instead, in 2017, a small group of young men — many of them fishermen and informal traders who had been pushed off their land to make way for the gas project — began attacking police stations and government buildings. They called themselves al-Shabaab, meaning "the youth" in Arabic. They had rudimentary weapons: machetes, homemade rifles, stolen AK-47s. By 2020, they controlled large swaths of rural Cabo Delgado.

What began as a local grievance metastasized. In 2019, some insurgent factions pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, which began claiming their attacks in its propaganda channels. Foreign fighters arrived — Tanzanians, Somalis, a handful of Kenyans. The weapons improved. In August 2020, insurgents beheaded more than fifty people in the village of Muatide. In March 2021, they took Palma.

The Attack on Palma

The attack lasted four days. Insurgents, estimated by military sources to number around 400, entered the town from three directions. They targeted the Amarula Hotel, where expatriate contractors working for TotalEnergies and its subcontractors had gathered. On March 26, a convoy of vehicles attempted to escape toward the beach, where boats were waiting. Insurgents ambushed the convoy. At least seven people were killed, including a British contractor whose body was later found with gunshot wounds to the head.

The Mozambican military, poorly equipped and demoralized after years of losses, was unable to retake the town for more than a week. TotalEnergies suspended all operations and evacuated its personnel. The $20 billion facility sat empty. Palma, meanwhile, was systematically destroyed. Insurgents looted homes, banks, and warehouses. They burned the district hospital. Survivors described seeing bodies in the streets for days.

Among the displaced was a fisherman named Momade Issa, who had lived in Palma for twenty-three years. In an interview conducted in a Pemba displacement camp in June 2021, he described watching insurgents execute three men in the town square. "They said the men were government spies," he told researchers from Human Rights Watch. "They made everyone watch. Then they told us to go home. There was no home to go to. They had burned it."

Rwanda Arrives

In July 2021, Mozambique did what it had resisted for years: it asked for foreign military intervention. Rwanda sent 1,000 troops. The Southern African Development Community deployed a mission — initially 2,916 personnel from South Africa, Tanzania, and other member states — under a mandate to "combat terrorism and acts of violent extremism." The mission was called SAMIM, the SADC Mission in Mozambique. It was the regional bloc's first such deployment since its intervention in Lesotho in 1998.

The Rwandan contingent, backed by helicopter gunships and experienced officers who had fought in eastern Congo, moved quickly. Within three months, they had retaken Palma and pushed insurgents out of the key port town of Mocímboa da Praia. SADC forces, operating separately and with less coordination, secured the corridor between Pemba and the gas fields. By early 2022, the insurgency had been pushed into the interior forests and across the border into Tanzania.

TotalEnergies announced in April 2022 that it would resume construction. Security, however, was now the primary cost. The company contracted Rwandan forces — who remain deployed as of April 2026 — to provide perimeter defense. SADC extended SAMIM's mandate three times. What was supposed to be a short-term stabilization mission became a permanent occupation. The Mozambican government pays for none of it. TotalEnergies does.

The Displacement Camps

Amina Hassane now lives in a camp called 25 de Junho, named after Mozambique's independence day. It is one of forty-seven displacement sites scattered across Cabo Delgado and neighboring Nampula province. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that only 38 percent of displaced families live in these formal camps. The rest stay with relatives, rent rooms they cannot afford, or occupy abandoned buildings.

Life in 25 de Junho is governed by scarcity. Water comes from a borehole that serves 14,000 people. The clinic has one nurse and no doctor. Children attend school in shifts because there are not enough teachers. Most families survive on food assistance from the World Food Programme, which in 2025 cut rations by 30 percent due to funding shortfalls. Amina's daughters have not been to school since they arrived. She cannot afford the unofficial fees teachers charge for registration.

"They tell us we can go home when it is safe," she said in an interview in February 2026. "But where is home? The house is gone. The town is gone. My husband is gone. Safe for who?"

The Mozambican government has announced several resettlement programs, including a $50 million World Bank-funded initiative to rebuild homes in Palma and Mocímboa da Praia. As of March 2026, fewer than 11,000 families have returned. Most find their land occupied, their wells destroyed, and no functioning markets or schools. The gas facility, meanwhile, is operational. TotalEnergies announced in January 2026 that first LNG exports would begin in the third quarter of this year.

Who Funds the Insurgency

The insurgency is sustained by two things: local recruitment and smuggling. Interviews with former fighters conducted by researchers at the Institute for Security Studies reveal a common profile. Most are men under thirty. Most are from families that were displaced or economically disrupted by the gas project. Many worked informally — fishing, small-scale trading, charcoal production — in economies that were criminalized or shut down when the extraction zones were declared off-limits.

The insurgency finances itself through ivory, timber, and gemstones smuggled across the Rovuma River into Tanzania. In 2023, Tanzanian authorities seized 47 kilograms of rough rubies in Mtwara, a border town north of Cabo Delgado. The stones had been mined illegally in Montepuez district and transported by insurgent couriers. The rubies were valued at $1.2 million. None of the money reached Maputo.

Weapons flow in from multiple directions. A 2024 investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found that insurgents had acquired Chinese-made rocket-propelled grenades originally sold to the Ugandan military, Belgian FN rifles traced to a Tanzanian police depot, and ammunition manufactured in Serbia and shipped to South Sudan before disappearing. In one documented case, insurgents used French-made night-vision equipment stolen from a TotalEnergies contractor's warehouse in Palma during the March 2021 attack.

What the Government Says

In Maputo, the government's position is clear: the insurgency is terrorism, it is externally funded, and it will be defeated militarily. President Filipe Nyusi, who leaves office in January 2025 under constitutional term limits, has repeatedly stated that Cabo Delgado is a security problem, not a development problem. His government has rejected calls for negotiations. "You do not negotiate with terrorists," Defense Minister Cristóvão Chume told journalists in September 2023.

But the government's own record complicates that narrative. In 2019, Mozambique contracted the Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary company, to fight the insurgency. Wagner deployed approximately 200 personnel. Within two months, at least seven Wagner fighters had been killed in ambushes. The company withdrew. In 2020, Mozambique hired the Dyck Advisory Group, a South African private military firm that used helicopter gunships and pilots with Rhodesian-era combat experience. DAG withdrew in 2021 after reports, documented by Amnesty International, that its helicopters had fired indiscriminately into crowds of civilians.

The Mozambican military itself has been accused of serious abuses. In November 2021, Human Rights Watch published testimony from displaced persons who said government soldiers had executed suspected insurgent sympathizers without trial, looted civilian homes, and demanded bribes at checkpoints. The Ministry of Defense denied the allegations.

Still Waiting

In March 2026, five years after the attack on Palma, Amina Hassane was still living in the tent she was assigned in 2021. Her daughters, now fourteen and sixteen, had not returned to school. She had not remarried. She had not found permanent work. She was part of a population that exists in administrative limbo: too displaced to return, too undocumented to resettle.

When asked what she wanted, she did not mention compensation or justice or even a house. She said, "I want to know where he is buried. I want to visit the place. I want my daughters to see it. That is all."

The Mozambican government has not compiled a list of those killed in Palma. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which runs a missing-persons program, has received 1,847 requests for information about relatives who disappeared during the attack. Of those, 214 have been resolved — meaning a body was found or a survivor located. The rest remain open cases.

Meanwhile, TotalEnergies proceeds. The company announced in February 2026 that it had signed a twenty-year supply contract with a Chinese state-owned importer. The first shipment of LNG — 3.4 million tonnes annually — is scheduled to leave Afungi in September. Mozambique will receive a 10 percent royalty. How much of that will reach Cabo Delgado is unclear. How much will reach Amina is not a question anyone is asking.

On the day of the interview, Amina was asked if she had heard that the gas facility was about to start production. She had not. She was asked what she thought it would mean for her. She looked at the tent, at the dust, at the line of people waiting for water. She said, "It already happened. This is what it means."