Spectres of Black Flags in the Miombo: The Islamic State's coverage of their Mozambique province, 2022-2023

Abstract

This article studies the Islamic State’s only remaining periodical, Al-Naba, identifying the most common tropes and patterns in the periodical’s Sub-Saharan Africa coverage, and on Mozambique in particular. The Islamic State’s increasingly important coverage of Africa focuses on terror attacks, military campaigns and on the fight against Christianity. However, it also employs more traditional anti-colonial arguments that have been used by other, more accepted, political actors during the struggle for decolonisation. Al-Naba also functions as a ‘shamer’ of non-African Muslims, to get them to join jihad by pointing to the African successes of the organisation and set these successes up as examples to be followed. In this sense, the article illustrates how African jihadist branches can have global agency.