The army fought the insurgency in northern Chad for a week. The first claimed Wednesday that it had killed 23 rebels and the second 15 soldiers in the Tibesti massif, where the two camps regularly clash.
In this desert region, the main Chadian rebel movements, long based in the south of neighboring Libya, maintain bases from which they harass the troops and launched an offensive in the spring of 2021, taking the front-line President Idriss Déby Itno killed .
On May 31, the army claimed to have attacked a “column” of rebels from the Front de la Nation pour la Démocratie et la Justice au Tchad (FNDJT) and the Military Command Council for the Salvation of the Republic (CCMSR) in the region of Kouri Bougoudi .
Since then, and especially after the end of the “clean-up” on Monday and Tuesday, “the final figure is 23 killed and eight wounded in our ranks of rebels,” army spokesman General Azem Bermandoa Agouna assured AFP.
The FNDJT, he assured in a press release Tuesday, had “forced the army to withdraw” and killed “15 soldiers, including two senior officers.”
The reports put forward by the two camps during their clashes cannot be independently verified in this gold-bearing region, more than 600 km as the crow flies from N’Djamena, where bandits, rebels, illegal gold miners and soldiers fight across spheres of influence.
The FNDJT and the CCMSR are among the most important and active rebel movements.
The most powerful, the Front pour l’Alternance et la Concorde au Tchad (FACT), launched an offensive towards N’Djamena from its bases in Libya and Tibesti in spring 2021.
He had been stopped and defeated by the army some 200 km north of the capital, but Marshal Déby, who had ruled Chad with an iron fist for more than 30 years, was there in an accident on April 20, 2021 on his way up the hill Life gained depending on strength from rebel fire at the front lines.
On the day his death was announced, the army had appointed one of his sons, the young General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, President of the Republic at the head of a junta of 15 generals.
He immediately promised to return power to civilians after an 18-month “transition” but ended up extending his mandate by two years based on a resolution passed by a national reconciliation forum, but boycotted by almost all of the political opposition and the most powerful rebel groups.