Speaking on Monday to the BBC, Dyck was sharply critical of the lack of a proper evacuation plan for the town, which many saw as an inevitable target of the militants once the rainy season was over, because of the absence of the Mozambican military and the refusal of Total to provide his helicopter crews with much needed fuel. “They completely wreaked havoc, and there was no evacuation plan.” “It was total chaos,” said Lionel Dyck, the founder of the South African private security company Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), which helped evacuate a number of those trapped by helicopter. Survivors have described having to hide while waiting to be rescued by boat from a town where headless bodies were left lying on the road. The picture of precisely what occurred between Wednesday and Sunday, when a flotilla of boats rescued hundreds of people, including many foreign workers, from Palma’s beaches, remains deeply confused.īut emerging accounts paint of picture of a brutal, days-long siege and deadly ambushes on those fleeing.

The group does not have any known connection to Somalia’s jihadists of that name, and have been active in Cabo Delgado since 2017, but their attacks have become much more frequent and deadly over the past year.

The first that people in the Mozambican city of Palma knew of the attack by Islamist militants was the sound of gunfire that erupted at 4pm on Wednesday afternoon.Ī focus of natural gas development in the Indian Ocean, the town, located close to the border with Tanzania, was under sustained attack from two directions by the Isis-affiliated al-Shabaab group, who have mounted a campaign of escalating terror in the northern Cabo Delgado region.

Chaos insurgency