Good afternoon. Yesterday saw the Islamic State-backed insurgents in Cabo Delgado province burn their second Catholic church in two weeks. On Thursday, a Catholic mission in the village of Minhuene in Ancube district was destroyed. This time the church was in the Ancuabe village of Nacoja (see story below). In the meantime, the religious aspect of the war have come more into the foreground, with statements from the Catholic archbishop of Nampula and from the Islamic Community of Mozambique condemning the violence.
As this newsletter noted on Monday, it suits the insurgents to play up the religious dimension; their supporters in Islamic State will approve, and it attracts a lot of attention and alarm. Burning a church generates headlines in a way that burning a hundred houses does not.
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However, it would be a mistake to overstate this aspect. It is very rare for the insurgents to attack religious buildings or symbols (as previously noted, the Meza attack was the first time they had burned a Catholic church since 2024), and although they sometimes challenge their captives to recite some verses from the Koran, they do not target Christians systematically. Insurgent commanders vary widely in whether and how they enforce sharia law in areas they control. Some of them are not very observant Muslims.
