🇲🇿 MOZAMBIQUE STABILITY INDEX

The Islamic State Mozambique (ISM) insurgency, running since 2017, re-escalated sharply through 2025 into 2026 — 500+ incidents in the first eight months of 2025, with a deliberate shift to strategic-corridor warfare.

• N380 corridor campaign: Repeated ambushes on military convoys (including joint Mozambican-Rwandan columns) along the Macomia–Oasse stretch — severing the road that carries military logistics, civilians, and commerce.
• Maritime dimension: Small-boat attacks on military and civilian targets off the Cabo Delgado coast — an insurgency with a littoral arm.
• Governance-by-insurgent: In coastal enclaves ISM runs preaching, coercion, and service provision to build legitimacy — a holding strategy, not mere raiding.
• Roots unchanged: Socio-economic exclusion amid gas and ruby wealth, a neglected Muslim north, and porous Tanzania links — the drivers predate and will outlast any single offensive.

Rwanda reinforced its deployment to roughly 2,000 RDF personnel amid the 2025-26 escalation — with airlift, logistics, and integrated operations alongside Mozambican forces — making Kigali the decisive external actor since SAMIM's withdrawal.

• Division of labor: RDF anchors Palma-Mocimboa (the LNG shield); Mozambican FDS covers the interior — where most N380 ambushes land.
• Tanzania's quiet front: ~300 TPDF troops hold the northern border under bilateral arrangements; Chapo's July 2026 Dar es Salaam visit paired trade-fair diplomacy with insurgency coordination.
• The Rwanda bargain: Kigali's deployment intertwines with commercial and diplomatic equities — a presence with its own strategic logic, and a dependency Maputo cannot yet replace.
• Post-SAMIM gap: The SADC mission's 2024 exit left rural Macomia and Muidumbe thinner — exactly where ISM's 2025-26 pressure concentrated.

Mozambique's Rovuma Basin holds one of Africa's largest gas endowments, and the fate of its LNG megaprojects is inseparable from the insurgency's trajectory — the platform's textbook conflict-commodity coupling.

• TotalEnergies Mozambique LNG ($20B, Afungi): Force majeure since the 2021 Palma attack; restart preparations have inched forward under RDF protection, with every corridor ambush repricing the timeline.
• ExxonMobil Rovuma LNG: The larger onshore train awaits final investment decision — sequenced behind Total's restart confidence.
• Eni Coral Sul FLNG: The offshore floating platform has exported since 2022 — proof the resource monetizes when insurgents can't reach it; Coral Norte expansion advances.
• Fiscal horizon: LNG revenues are the state's projected transformation — and the insurgency's implicit hostage. "LNG suspended / LNG resumes" language is wired into this page's escalation ladder for exactly that reason.

The Cabo Delgado conflict has displaced over a million people at its peaks, with cyclical return-and-reflight as frontlines move — layered onto cyclone seasons and the early-2026 floods that battered the center-north.

• Return-zone fragility: Government return pushes into districts with unrebuilt services and residual ISM presence create protection risks and re-displacement cycles — the platform's bidirectional migration model applies.
• Beheadings and terror signaling: ISM's atrocity pattern (the 2025 Mocimboa da Praia attacks) is deliberate displacement strategy, not incidental brutality.
• Funding cliff: Global aid cuts in 2025-26 shrank rations and services in IDP sites precisely as displacement re-accelerated.
• Climate stack: Cyclone exposure (Idai's legacy through the 2026 floods) makes Mozambique a compound-crisis caseload — conflict, climate, and now fiscal shock on one coastline.

Mozambique's fiscal story runs from the $2B "tuna bond" hidden-debt scandal (2016) to cautious re-engagement — a June 2026 IMF mission and $450M in fresh World Bank financing signal conditional confidence in the Chapo government.

• Shock ledger 2026: Early-year floods, Middle East conflict fallout on fuel and freight, and post-election disruption to trade corridors — growth carries a triple discount.
• Debt overhang: The hidden-loans legacy (and the UBS/Credit Suisse litigation trail) still shadows sovereign credibility; LNG receipts are the promised exit.
• Corridor economy: Beira and Nacala corridors serve landlocked neighbors — protest roadblocks in the 2024-25 crisis showed how fast political unrest becomes regional trade disruption.
• Ruby and graphite: Montepuez rubies and Balama graphite (battery supply chains) give the north non-gas stakes — both inside the conflict zone's shadow.