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As the rich get richer and the Global South gets poorer, expect more conflict
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My most recent column warned of the escalating threat of worsening conflicts driven by al-Qaida, Isis and their offshoots, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the weeks since, a horrific example of this has played out in northern Mozambique, finally attracting global media attention to the long ignored four-year insurgency.

The Isis-affiliated group, Al Shabaab, succeeded in taking over the town of Palma in the country’s Cabo Delgado province in the attack that began on 24 March, causing thousands to flee.

Palma is a spread out town of 75,000 people in the north, 20 kilometres from the border with Tanzania. Despite its large geographical area, it was seized by only 100 insurgents, through a series of brutal attacks. The government in Maputo quickly retook the town and claimed victory, although it looked far more likely that the insurgencies had simply melted away after achieving their aim of demonstrating their burgeoning power.

Their bloody victory belies the claim that the ‘war on terror’ is in the latter stages and, interestingly, has remarkable parallels with events nearly four years ago in the southern Philippines city of Marawi. Then, paramilitaries linked to Isis took over the city for four months, at the same time as the organisation in Iraq and Syria was being crippled by an all-out, US-led air war.

Extreme violence

Isis came to prominence in early 2014, emerging from the remains of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), and immediately demonstrated huge force. By July of that year, it had taken over territory almost as large as the UK, stretching across much of northern Syria and Iraq, and home to around six million people.

Its methods were often violent in the extreme, especially against the Yazidis in northern Iraq, and fearing a threat to Baghdad itself, the US started an intense air war in response. By the end of that year, a substantial air power coalition had formed that also involved France, the UK, Australia, and some regional powers, and there were hundreds of air raids each month involving thousands of missiles and precision-guided bombs.

In the four-year war, the number of Isis fighters killed was massive, exceeding 60,000, but most of the fighting was over by mid-2017. At that time, the extraordinary events around Marawi in the Philippines, close to 8,000 kilometres to the east, were beginning to unfold, belying the claim that Isis was finished.

The Marawi uprising stemmed from an Islamist paramilitary movement demanding autonomy for the island of Mindanao, failing to achieve it and then taking a harder line, partly inspired by the earlier rise of Isis. The government in Manila didn’t take the threat of violence seriously until the militant group, Abu Sayyaf, took control of part of the city in May 2017 in an insurgency that was to last four months.

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