President Mahama Idriss Deby of Chad on Tuesday ordered a “nationwide military response” against the terrorists of Boko Haram, who killed over forty Chadian troops in an attack in the Lake Chad Basin.
Deby also ordered three days of national mourning for the fallen soldiers, who were killed on Sunday night when Boko Haram attacked the western village of Ngouboua.
Deby visited Ngouboua on Monday to pay his respects, then ordered all flags flown at half-mast, and all of Chad’s radio and TV stations to play only religious music until Thursday.
After the funeral for the slain troops, which he attended in military dress, Deby announced “Operation Haskanite,” a massive troop surge into the Lake Chad Basin with the goal of eliminating Boko Haram. “Haskanite” is a famously tough plant that grows in the Lake Chad area.
The government of Chad published a statement on Tuesday urging the international community to “intensify its support and to reinforce assistance in counter-terrorism efforts in particular in the Sahel region and Lake Chad basin.”
“Determined collective action is essential to eradicate this scourge which threatens the stability and the development of the entire region,” the statement said.
The French embassy responded that “France stands with Chad in the fight against terrorism,” and offered condolences for the slain Chadian soldiers. Chad is the last country in the region to host a French military presence, although it has also been flirting with developing stronger ties to Russia.
Chad also reached out to the Multinational Joint Task Force of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (MNJTF), a counter-terrorist force of about 11,000 troops drawn from Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria.
The MNJTF claimed in August that its operations have “degraded” Boko Haram, but evidently not enough to prevent the terrorists from launching a massive attack on a Chadian military outpost. The task force had not responded to Chad’s request for assistance as of Wednesday morning.
The attack on Sunday involved hundreds of heavily armed Boko Haram jihadis launching a surprise attack on the military garrison in Ngouboua at roughly 10:00 p.m. local time.
Boko Haram “took control of the garrison, seized the weapons, burnt vehicles equipped with heavy arms, and left,” according to local eyewitnesses.
The military garrison housed about 200 soldiers, while Chadian military officials said there were more than 300 attackers, who were well-equipped going in, and even better-equipped coming out of the operation. The Boko Haram force reportedly withdrew into nearby villages and fled across Lake Chad after the assault.
The Lake Chad Basin became Boko Haram’s preferred theater of operations soon after the jihadi insurgent group was formed in Nigeria in 2009. Sunday’s action was the group’s most devastating attack on Chadian forces since 2020, when it killed about one hundred troops in a raid.
The president of Chad at the time, the current president’s father Idriss Deby, ordered a similar response to the one his son ordered on Monday, but obviously Boko Haram was not eliminated. Idriss Deby was killed in April 2021 while fighting a different insurgency called the Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) near the Liberian border.
