In October, we traveled to the Cabo Delgado Province in northern Mozambique to understand how terrorists who claim an affiliation with the Islamic State have gained a foothold and wreaked havoc on Muslims and Christians alike.

Officials in the region and in the West say they are deeply concerned that if the Islamic State affiliate known as ISIS-Mozambique is not contained, then the loosely linked Islamic State network that has been gaining ground in pockets of Africa could become a bigger global threat.

What locals call “the war” has robbed the region of what was a largely peaceful life of fishing and farming.

Nearly 6,000 people have been killed and up to half of the province’s 2.3 million people have been displaced. Finding food and shelter has become a daily struggle in a province rich with natural resources like rubies, gas and timber.

Since our visit, the country has grown only more tense. After a disputed presidential election, Mozambique has been engulfed in the worst election-related violence since a long-running civil war ended in 1992. Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets across the country to protest a result that many believe was rigged by the governing party, Frelimo. Nearly 300 people have been killed during the protests, according to Decide Electoral Platform, a civil society organization.

On top of that, Cabo Delgado and Nampula province to the south took a direct hit from Cyclone Chido in mid-December, killing as many as 120 people, displacing tens of thousands, and leaving many without food and clean water.

There is little doubt that the insurgency is at its weakest, diplomats and security analysts say, down to a few hundred fighters from several thousand. That is mostly because international troops, led by the Rwandan military, have picked up the slack for Mozambique’s ill-equipped and ill-trained armed forces.

But insurgents have now broken into small groups scattered across the dense forests of a province roughly the size of Austria, turning the conflict into a game of Whac-a-Mole, security experts said. Attacks are smaller than in the past. But they were more frequent in 2024 than in 2023, and have spread to previously unaffected areas.

“The government is doing the best it can,” Valige Tauabo, the governor of the province, said in an interview.

Where the Insurgency Began

Our Cessna 206 landed on an airstrip in Mocimboa da Praia, a sleepy fishing village that was the birthplace of the insurgency. A Rwandan soldier in battle gear surveilled us from the control tower.

Because of the high risk of ambushes, we had chartered a flight from the provincial capital, Pemba, a luxury few residents can afford.

We hopped into a sedan that wove around barricades set up by the Rwandan military and made our way into the village.

In October 2017, more than two dozen insurgents raided a police station in Mocimboa da Praia and killed two officers in the first attack of the insurgency.

Back then, the group called itself Al Shabab (analysts say it is unaffiliated with the Shabab in Somalia). Researchers say it had begun forming around 2005, when the teachings of extremist clerics from neighboring Tanzania to the north began infiltrating the mosques and madrassas in Cabo Delgado.

To win recruits, the extremists told the locals that while they struggled in poverty, their land was rich in natural resources. Lucrative natural gas reserves that had attracted some $24 billion in foreign investment, including nearly $5 billion from the United States, were nearby, off the coastal town of Palma.

Resentment of the government grew with multiple reports of the Mozambican military assaulting or killing civilians in Palma.

But the insurgents’ early message quickly got lost in their brutality.

In March 2020, Islamist militants gathered village residents on a soccer field in Mocimboa da Praia and warned them not to associate with the government, or “we’re going to decapitate everyone,” recalled Sanula Issa.

Only a couple of weeks later, Ms. Issa said, she was startled awake early one morning by gunfire and shouts of, “Allahu akbar!”

She raced to the beach with her husband and three children, she said, and tried to pile into boats with others. But the insurgents grabbed her husband and decapitated him with a machete, said Ms. Issa, 33, wiping away tears with a pink head scarf.

“They are evil,” said Ms. Issa, who once cooked rice for sailors. “They ruined people’s lives — innocent people.”

But it is not as though the locals turned to the government.

“Our dislike goes both ways,” said Rabia Muandimo Issa, who is no relation to Sanula Issa. She lost her brother and sister, and her home in Mocimboa da Praia, in an insurgent attack five years ago. “We don’t see good coming either from the government or the insurgents.”

A Displacement Crisis

For most of his 20 years, Muinde Macassari had a comfortable life in a shack near the ocean, fishing with his family. But since insurgents stormed his seaside village of Quiterajo two years ago, he has been sleeping on blankets in his aunt’s yard in Pemba, sharing a tent with two relatives.

The heat in the tattered tent becomes oppressive, and rain trickles through the torn canvas.

Hundreds of thousands of people have returned to their communities, only to find that their jobs, homes and stability are now gone.

Hundreds of thousands of others, like Mr. Macassari, live displaced in unfamiliar communities.

More than 80,000 displaced people are now crowding into Pemba, which had previously held about 200,000 residents. Aid organizations say Mozambique’s conflict does not get the assistance it needs because it is overshadowed by other global crises.

Mothers with children wrapped to their backs crowd clinics for child malnutrition treatment. Displaced people cram into the low-slung homes of family, friends and good Samaritans, using bedsheets as dividing walls.

Mr. Macassari sleeps outside because his aunt’s squat, two-bedroom concrete home is already full with 10 people.

He had been kidnapped by the insurgents, he said, forced to wash their clothes and stand guard, but says he was never sent into battle. He slept in the forest on an uncomfortable bed made of coconut tree leaves and ate just occasional portions of rice, corn and cassava.

Mr. Macassari said he understood some of the grievances the extremists preached — about the political elite riding around in fancy cars while everyone else was poor. But if the insurgents’ complaints are with the government, Mr. Macassari wondered, “why then are they killing innocent people?”

He escaped one night, using a bathroom break as an excuse, he said. He ran through the bush until he made it to a nearby village.

A Sour Homecoming

When insurgents captured Cheia Cassiano during an attack on Mocimboa da Praia in early 2020, they offered him a choice: You can join us, or we can kill you.

Over the next year, Mr. Cassiano, now 37, said the insurgents forced him to run, lift weights, fire a gun — and attack villages. They preached their message loudly: The war will not end until the end of the world; men should wear pants and women long skirts; everyone needed to pledge fealty to Islam, not the government.

“I was anxious,” Mr. Cassiano said. “Within the insurgency, when you don’t perform according to the plan, they can kill you.”

The insurgents seized control of Mocimboa da Praia in August 2020 and held it for a year, until troops from Rwanda and countries in southern Africa drove them out. It was the longest the insurgents had occupied a town over the course of the conflict.

Mocimboa da Praia emptied out during the occupation in 2020. But in 2022, residents began returning and life in many ways seems to have returned to normal. A market in the center of town buzzes at night with street vendors and growling motorcycle taxis. Fishermen gather around a sandy cove at sunrise, preparing nets and wooden boats, and drying out fish on tarps. Teams compete on dirt soccer fields.

But with just a little probing, it is easy to find deep physical and mental scars.

The steeple of the Catholic church in the center of town stands tall, but most of the building has been reduced to rubble. Next door, an elementary school is mostly gutted, with faded writing on a chalkboard reminding parents of a deadline, now years old, to enroll their children. A hospital infirmary is just a metal skeleton.

Where statues once stood of two of Mozambique’s liberation heroes, Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel, there are just broken foundations.

Many residents returned after the fighting to find empty patches of dirt where their homes made of red clay and thin logs once stood.

Mr. Cassiano, who joined the fighters after he was kidnapped, said his house had been burned down. He has rebuilt it and now sells fish for a living, but carries a visible scar of the conflict: He is missing his right hand. He said that he got into a dispute with his fellow insurgents over a bicycle he took from a village they raided. They accused him of stealing the bike from a group leader, he said, and, in accordance with their interpretation of Shariah law, chopped off his hand.

Trying to Heal

At a community center next to a displacement camp in Mocimboa da Praia, children in an art therapy workshop sometimes draw stick figures without heads, or sculpt mounds of clay into rifles.

One recent day, children sat in a circle singing, keeping the rhythm by slapping rock-filled plastic bottles on the ground.

“Children have the right to play,” they sang, “and to live as a child.”

One 12-year-old said she was only 8 when she was kidnapped by insurgents from Mocimboa da Praia and sexually assaulted multiple times while in captivity. She was once beaten for not putting on her hijab properly. She escaped into the bush with several women, and says she ate sand to stay alive.

She acted erratically when she returned home, said her aunt and uncle, whom she lives with because her parents were killed in an insurgent attack.

“I have seen people killed!” she would scream in sudden outbursts, her aunt said.

She is now back in school, and said she has begun to recover by spending time with other child survivors who gather at the center, run by the Foundation for Community Development, a local nonprofit. As we sat on the ground speaking, she stared downward, tracing the sand with a twig. The horrific things she has experienced, she said, are now motivation for her life ahead.

“I want to be a nurse,” she said, “to help other people in my community.”