The secret bond that helped two captive women survive Mozambique’s Islamists

The Guardian : Ancha*, who was 20, had been kidnapped and held captive in a house in northern Mozambique for two months when 17-year-old Fatima* was brought there. What their captors did not know – even after the young women’s daring escape together – was that they were cousins.

Both had grown up around Mucojo, a small coastal town 130 miles (210km) south of the Tanzanian border, from where they had been abducted in separate raids in 2020 by Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jamaa militants, an Islamic State-affiliated group known locally as al-Shabaab (though it has no links with the Islamist militants of the same name in Somalia).

The group has been kidnapping and killing girls and women as it fights government and African Union forces in the country’s northernmost province of Cabo Delgado since the conflict began in 2017. More than 1 million people are reported to have been displaced by fighting in the region.

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