“They treated us like animals,” said the 35-year-old mother of five, breastfeeding her youngest child outside of a tent at the Metuge refugee camp she now calls home. “I will never forget what they did to us. They killed every old man they saw, kidnapped the young men and mercilessly raped the women.”
Mrs. Joaquim is one of the estimated 670,000 people displaced by the shadowy, brutal Islamist militant organization linked with the Islamic State group known as al-Shabab, or “The Youth.” The Mozambique force has no known link to a similarly named group affiliated with al Qaeda in Somalia but has quickly earned a reputation as a growing threat to stability in Mozambique and other parts of the region.