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Cabo Delgado
Mozambique's northernmost province, where an Islamic State-linked insurgency persists beside Africa's largest gas projects
Cabo Delgado, Mozambique's northernmost province on the Indian Ocean, sits beside some of the largest natural gas reserves in Africa and has endured an insurgency since 2017. The militants, known locally as al-Shabaab but unrelated to the Somali group, have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, which calls them its Mozambique Province. ACLED counts about 6,500 people killed in the conflict, some 2,700 of them civilians, and IOM counted nearly a million people displaced at the peak in 2022. In January 2026 TotalEnergies restarted construction of its $20 billion Mozambique LNG project on the Afungi peninsula, halted since insurgents overran nearby Palma in 2021, even as attacks continue in the districts to the south.
The province covers about 82,600 square kilometers, from the Rovuma River on the Tanzanian border south to the Lúrio River, with a coast of coral islands and mangroves, including the Quirimbas archipelago, and a dry interior plateau around Mueda. Pemba, the provincial capital, sits on one of the largest natural bays on the African coast. The insurgents hold no fixed territory but move through the forests of Macomia, Muidumbe, Ancuabe and Mocímboa da Praia districts, and have raided into neighboring Niassa and Nampula. Mozambican forces and several thousand Rwandan troops, deployed since July 2021, guard Palma, Mocímboa da Praia and the gas zone at Afungi. Offshore, the Rovuma basin's Area 1 and Area 4 hold the gas fields.
Cabo Delgado was where FRELIMO opened its armed struggle against Portuguese rule in 1964, and it has long been among Mozambique's poorest provinces, where ruby and gas discoveries in the 2010s raised expectations that many residents say went unmet. The insurgency began with an attack on Mocímboa da Praia in October 2017. After the 2021 Palma attack, Rwanda and a Southern African Development Community force intervened and retook key towns. The SADC mission left in 2024, leaving Rwanda, whose deployment Mozambique said in May 2026 it had secured funding to keep. Eni's Coral Sul floating plant has exported gas since 2022, and Mozambique LNG targets first cargo in 2029. OCHA recorded more than 26,000 newly displaced in the first half of 2026, and aid groups say about 900,000 people in the province need assistance.