Army Green Berets are already training Mozambique marines — report.
The US military has reportedly joined the growing fight against jihadist insurgents in northern Mozambique.
A dozen US Army Green Beret special forces began training Mozambican marines this week in a two-month programme, the New York Times reported.
The move indicates a greater commitment by the new Biden administration to the fight against the Islamic State-linked insurgency than that of the previous Trump administration.
Last week Washington formally designated the insurgency — which it named Isis-Mozambique — as a global terrorist organisation and imposed sanctions on it and its leader, whom it named as Abu Yasir Hassan.
The insurgents who operate in Mozambique’s northernmost Cabo Delgado province sometimes call themselves Al-Sunna wa Jama’a, (ASWJ). Locals also call them Al-Shabaab — though they are not known to have any formal link to the group of that name in Somalia, which is affiliated to Al-Qaeda, not the Islamic State.
The threat posed by the insurgents to the huge natural gas reserves in northern Mozambique has probably helped motivate the growing US involvement in the conflict. The US oil and gas corporation Exxon-Mobil has major concessions in the…