With the focus of a three-year-old, it is hard to say what will grab Donald Trump’s attention next. But northern Mozambique surely has all of the ingredients for a brewing potjiekos that he and his minions – notably the sinister deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller – will eventually scent. In the wake of the US military strikes on Islamic militants in Nigeria and the audacious snatching of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, it may only be a matter of time before the unfolding violence in northern Mozambique appears on US President Donald Trump’s radar screen.
The combustible mix there has all the hallmarks of a red rag for Trump: an Islamist insurgency with links to Islamic State (IS) in a region that has become a hub for drug smuggling with massive offshore gas projects involving oil majors including US hydrocarbon giant ExxonMobil. The insurgency first flared in 2017 in Cabo Delgado province in the northeast, and the Mozambican state with Rwandan military backing has been unable to snuff it out. Indeed, the violence intensified last year with 730 security incidents – double the number in 2024 – and 466 direct attacks, according to theUN’s humanitarian wing OCHA.
“The violence triggered repeated waves of displacement across Cabo Delgado, Nampula and Niassa, forcing over 230,000 people to flee as of October 2025 – the highest number since 2020,” OCHA said. This is a swelling humanitarian crisis exacerbated by the gutting of USAID and the slashing of European aid flows – a catastrophe that has been cast in the shadows with the global spotlight thrown on the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and now Venezuela. It is also a state of affairs that casts an unflattering light on the dark underbelly of the oil industry in Africa, which for decades has fuelled corruption and conflict on the continent on a grand scale.
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France’s TotalEnergies has been accused of complicity in war crimes – which it denies – related to a2021 massacre near its gas projectin the region. A complaint was filed with French prosecutors in November by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). “The oil and gas major is accused of having directly financed and materially supported the Joint Task Force, composed of Mozambican armed forces, which between July and September 2021 allegedlydetained, tortured and killeddozens of civilians onTotalEnergies’ gas site,” ECCHR said.
The case was launched just after Total lifted the force majeure on its liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Mozambique. ExxonMobil, in late November, followed suit, lifting its declaration of force majeure on its Rovuma LNG project in Mozambique. TheChristmas Day US military strikesin northwestern Nigeria targeted jihadists linked to IS. Trump had previously claimed that the Nigerian government was doing nothing to prevent the slaughter and persecution of Nigerian Christians – red meat to the hard-right US Christian nationalists who comprise a key plank of his Republican political base.
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