On March 24, Ansar al-Sunna, a militant group linked to the Islamic State, launched a bloody attack on the coastal town of Palma, in northern Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, leaving at least 61 dead and scores more unaccounted for. The assault, which lasted more than a week and took place near a major liquefied natural gas plant under construction by the French energy giant Total, made global headlines and shined a spotlight on a fast-growing insurgency. Though the group has since been pushed out of Palma by Mozambican security forces, the attack highlights the danger should the insurgents expand their [...]
When an obscure rebel group briefly laid siege to a hotel in Palma—a tiny enclave of the global energy industry in northern Mozambique—in late March, the story briefly became one of those one- or two-day wonders common to the Western media’s coverage of Africa. This typically means momentary headlines from a place that most readers have never heard of, and that most mainstream editors traditionally exhibit little interest in delving into more deeply. As is so often the case with the coverage of violence from outposts like these, what made this particular news “newsworthy” was the fate of a small [...]
In 2017, the United States launched its Global Magnitsky Sanctions program, meant to target human rights abusers and kleptocrats around the world. The very first list of sanctioned entities included one Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire who had been accused by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, in consultation with the secretary of state and attorney general, of amassing his fortune through a series of “opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals” in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over the next six months, around 30 of Gertler’s companies were further sanctioned, as the Treasury Department forbade him from [...]
