"Here, in this area, there are many girls who were kidnapped and forced to marry terrorists," said 17-year-old Telma from the Chiure district in the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado. A brutal war between an "Islamic State"-affiliated extremist group and Mozambican security forces and their allies has been raging in her home region since October 2017.

"In our neighborhood, there is a girl who managed to escape the terrorists after three years of captivity and return to her family," Telma said. "But most never come back. The jihadis also abduct very young girls. They grow up with the terrorists until they reach puberty. Then they are forced into sex and have to bear children."

Telma's account was one of the hundreds of testimonies collected and analyzed by aid workers in northern Mozambique and summarized in a recent report on "forced child marriages in Cabo Delgado.", published by Save The Children Mozambique.

"The problem of forced marriages of underage girls already existed before the war, but it was long taboo. The background is cultural and social. Since the start of the terror, the problem has dramatically worsened. We have to do something about it," Paula Sengo Timane, one of the........

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