US special forces have deployed to Mozambique to train local forces to battle an insurgency in the country’s north. A dozen US Army Green Berets started training Mozambican marines this week and will continue to train them over the next two months.
There are other signs that the US may become more involved in Mozambique. The US claims the group fighting in northeastern Mozambique has ties to ISIS. Last week, the Biden administration designated the group, known as al-Sunna wa Jama’a, as a foreign terrorist organization.
But it’s not clear how strong the ties are between al-Sunna wa Jama’a and ISIS, or if they are even linked at all. The US is quick to lump together Islamist militant groups in Africa with ISIS or al-Qaeda as a pretext for intervention.
Even a report The New York Times questioned the link between the two groups. The Times story said some experts fear the terror designation from the US could hamper future efforts to end the fighting through negotiations or complicate humanitarian aid deliveries.
The Times report said the group is estimated to have about 800 members. The fighting has been ongoing since 2017 in Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province of Mozambique, where major natural gas reserves have been discovered in recent years.
The US International Development Finance Corporation, which the Trump administration launched to counter China’s infrastructure projects, has invested heavily in gas projects in Mozambique.
Yet another war!
Any oil fields in the region ?
We are not going in unless oil is involved and the usual excuse is islamists.
Offshore gas fields, recently discovered. From eia.gov: “substantial natural gas deposits discovered in Area 1 and Area 4 of Mozambique’s deepwater Rovuma Basin, which lies off the northern coast of the country, could transform the country into a significant liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter.”
Coincidentally, I’m sure, the Rovuma Basin is off the northern east coast of Mozambique. The marines are said to be headed to Cabo Delgado which is directly adjacent.
from DefenseOne
How Special Ops Became the Solution to Everything
They’ve become a major military player—and maybe a substitute for strategic thinking.
. . .It happened out of necessity. We now live in an open-ended world of “competition short of conflict,” to use a phrase from military doctrine. “There’s the continuum of absolute peace, which has never existed on the planet, up to toe-to-toe full-scale warfare,” General Raymond A. “Tony” Thomas, a former head of SOCOM, told me last year. “Then there’s that difficult in-between space.. . .SOCOM, whose genealogy can be traced to a small hostage-rescue team in 1979, has grown to fully inhabit the in-between space. Made up of elite soldiers pulled from each of the main military branches—Navy SEALs, the Army’s Delta Force and Green Berets, Air Force Combat Controllers, Marine Raiders—it is active in more than 80 countries and has swelled to a force of 75,000, including civilian contractors..here
Hey, what else can we do. Let’s send some assassins to country X. . .