More than 210 000 people, most of them women and children, have been forced to flee their homes in northern Mozambique since 2017, when a shadowy Islamist group started waging deadly attacks on the region, the UN said Thursday.

Around 50 000 of those displacements have occurred in the past three months, as the jihadists ramped up their bloody campaign in the southern African country's gas-rich Cabo Delgado province.

"Displacement has risen rapidly as violence has escalated, with 211 485 people now estimated to be internally displaced in Cabo Delgado," the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement, citing IOM statistics.

Since October 2017, the jihadists have wrought havoc among the province's communities, staging around 300 attacks, burning huts, decapitating villagers and killing more than 1 100 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).

The latest attack, which occurred in the Macomia district late last month, is considered by experts to be the most violent and most organised by the group locally known as Al-Shabaab, which has no link to the jihadist group of the same name that operates in Somalia and Kenya.