Chad accused Sudan of arming and financing rebel groups on Chadian territory with the aim of destabilising its neighbor.
Chad claims Sudan is aiding a rebellion by members of the Zaghawa ethnic group operating out of Sudan’s southwestern El Facher region.
“Sudan is financing and arming terrorist groups operating in the sub-region with the aim of destabilising Chad,” foreign affairs minister and government spokesman Abderaman Koulamallah said in a press release.
The Zaghawa rebels based in Sudan are led by Ousman Dillo, the younger brother of Chadian opposition leader Yaya Dillo Djerou, who was killed by Chadian military forces earlier this year.
In February 2008, a Zaghawa rebel group based in Sudan launched a lightning offensive in Chad along with other groups, forcing former president Idriss Deby Itno to take refuge in his presidential palace, before he was able to repel them with help from France.
In 2021, Idriss Deby Itno died fighting other rebel forces near the border with Libya and the army named his son Mahamat Idriss Deby as president.
Sudan’s government has accused Chad of meddling in its own civil war by helping to deliver weapons from the United Arab Emirates to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary forces, which Chad and the UAE have denied.
“I present my sincere condolences to the families of the martyrs who fell defending the homeland during this clash and I wish a speedy recovery to the wounded,” President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno said in a post on Facebook, without providing any other details.
The clash was the latest since late October, when an attack by Boko Haram militants on a Chadian military base killed at least 40 people. In response, the army launched an operation against the militants.
In a statement, the army chief of staff said on Saturday that there was a clash during the day and after several hours “numerous terrorist elements were neutralized” and that a toll would be published later.
According to military sources, the fighting took place in the afternoon on the Karia island, in the northwest of the Lake Chad region.
Several local media published what they said were lists of the troops killed and wounded.
Elsewhere in Africa, gunmen killed 15 people in an attack on a northwest Nigerian village, officials confirmed, amid reports of a newly arrived militant group operating in the area.
The deputy governor of Kebbi State said the assault on Mera, around 50 kilometers from the Niger border, had been carried out by “unknown gunmen.
But the latest massacre came after officials warned that an Islamist group known as “Lakurawa,” thought to hail from Mali and Niger, had crossed into Nigeria.
Kebbi’s deputy governor, Umar Tafida, and senior security officials attended funeral prayers for the 15 victims in Mera, his office said in a statement.
Nigeria has been plagued by armed violence since the 2009 emergence of the Boko Haram group in the Lake Chad basin, in the northeast of the country.
Various militant groups have split from or emerged alongside the insurgency, notorious for several mass kidnappings of school girls, despite a military crackdown.
Armed bandits and kidnap gangs have also spread chaos across the region, alongside sometimes bloody conflicts between farming communities and nomadic herdsmen.
Chad’s military inflicted “many dead and wounded” in air strikes against Boko Haram jihadists, President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno said on Thursday.
“We carried out several air strikes on enemy positions that resulted in many dead and wounded,” Deby told reporters in the Lake Chad region, without giving specific numbers.
Deby, who gave an interview in full military fatigues, said he had “personally” launched the counter-attack against Boko Haram, which targeted the Chadian army in an attack last month in the western region, close to the border with Nigeria.
The Chad government had vowed to “obliterate” Boko Haram when launching its operation in late October after the jihadists killed around 40 people and wounded dozens more in a raid on a military garrison.
The operation “aims not only to secure our peaceful population” but also to “hunt down, root out and obliterate the capability of Boko Haram and its affiliates to cause harm,” interim Prime Minister Abderahim Bireme Hamid told reporters last week.
In a vast expanse of water and swamps, the Lake Chad region’s countless islets serve as hideouts for jihadist groups, such as Boko Haram and its offshoot Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP), who carry out regular attacks on the country’s army and civilians.
Chad and its neighbors Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon set up a multinational force of some 8,500 soldiers in the area in 2015 to tackle the jihadists.
Boko Haram launched an insurgency in Nigeria in 2009, leaving more than 40,000 people dead, and the organization has since spread to neighboring countries.
In March 2020, the Chadian army suffered its biggest ever one-day losses in the region, when around 100 troops died in a raid on the lake’s Bohoma peninsula.
