Andres Schipani in Adré, Chad
Monday July 17, 2023
The Kalashnikov-carrying Chadian soldiers stationed outside the border town of Adré have a clear mission: prevent the brutal war in neighbouring Sudan from spilling over the frontier.
“The situation will get worse,” local governor Bachar Ali Souleyman said of the three-month conflict that has pitted Sudan’s de facto president and armed forces leader against the paramilitary leader who goes by the name Hemeti.
“The problems in Khartoum affect Chad so we’re blocking any spillover,” Souleyman said of the upheaval in the Sudanese capital that has already forced 2.5mn people to flee their homes nationwide.
The volatile Sahel region, the semi-arid strip of land below the Sahara, has long been blighted by violence and insecurity, and has become a haven for jihadis over the past decade.
Now Sudan’s descent into violence and the growing threat to Chad risks connecting the conflict zones into a vast corridor of instability that stretches from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. This would heap fresh misery on the inhabitants of some of the world’s poorest countries while threatening more prosperous west African states such as Ivory Coast and Togo.“A collapsed Sudan will morph into an actual haven for jihadis to destabilise the wider Horn of Africa,” said Rashid Abdi, a regional expert at the Sahan Research consultancy. It would “link the Sahel and the Horn jihadi belts, predominantly al-Shabaab in Somalia” with ideologically aligned groups allied to al-Qaeda and Isis, he added.
UN assistant secretary-general for Africa, Martha Pobee, went further in May when she told the Security Council that the “continuing destabilisation of the Sahel would be felt far beyond the region and the African continent”.
The Sahel upheaval began when rebels, including returning mercenaries who fought with Muammer Gaddafi in Libya, seized northern Mali in 2012. Thousands have been killed as the insecurity has spread and millions more have been displaced as global terror groups found space to thrive.
UN counter-terrorism chief Vladimir Voronkov told the Security Council in February that the growing presence of Isis in the Sahel, as well as in central and southern Africa, was “particularly worrying”.
Martin Ewi, an Africa security expert, said Isis was a direct threat to 20 African countries, with a further 20 nations used as logistics hubs by the jihadis. He warned that Africa had the potential to be the “future of the ‘caliphate’”, which is what Isis called the territory in Syria and Iraq it seized a decade ago before its territorial defeat.
Of particular concern was the Lake Chad basin spanning Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon, which Ewi said was now the “biggest area of operation” for Isis. An Isis offshoot is also active in both the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique, while rebels linked to the terror group were accused of last month’s massacre of schoolchildren in Uganda.
The threat would only be compounded if the same groups managed to exploit the Sudan conflict and instability in Chad to link up with Somalia, which remains the Horn of Africa terrorist hotspot, analysts say. Remadji Hoinathy, senior researcher in central Africa for the Institute for Security Studies in N’Djamena, said the Sudan war risked becoming a “conflict with no borders”.
In Chad, the threat from instability has been exacerbated since President Idriss Déby was killed fighting insurgents in 2021. Déby was a key western ally in the war on terror and the French-led effort against jihadism in the Sahel.
Analysts say his son and successor, Mahamat Déby, lacks the drive and charisma of his father, who turned the Chadian army into the region’s most effective fighting machine. A senior non-African official in N’Djamena said a full-blown conflict in Sudan “weakens Déby’s control of eastern Chad, which weakens Déby’s control in N’Djamena, which weakens Chad’s stability”.
“If things go really bad in Sudan and then Chad follows, it isn’t just troubles from Mauritania to the Red Sea — it’s from the Mediterranean to the DRC,” continued the official, who also pointed to an “opportunity for meddling by the Russians”.
Moscow has been upping its activities in the region. The regime in Mali — where a Tuareg rebellion continues, and an Isis offshoot and a consortium of al-Qaeda-linked groups are both active — has asked UN peacekeepers to leave and replaced French troops with mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group.
Wagner also has a base in the Central African Republic bordering Chad, while CAR hosts Chadian rebels friendly with Hemeti, according to analysts. The junta in Burkina Faso has struck a co-operation deal with Moscow and ordered French troops back home.
Yet Sudan remains the key, according to Ali Abdelrahmane Haggar, a senior adviser to Déby. “It’ll become very complicated for Chad and for the Sahel if the situation in Sudan is not resolved,” he said. “When there’s a problem in Sudan, there’s necessarily a problem in Chad, Nigeria, Niger, Libya.”
Chad and its military are officially neutral in the Sudan conflict, according to Ousman Bahar, a local commander. But the battle cries of Chadian soldiers in Adré — “Hemeti bandit, tu ne verras pas ici”, or “Hemeti the bandit, you won’t be seen here” — reveal their deep animosity towards him.
Hemeti, whose full name is Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, hails from a clan of Chadian-Arab nomads and led a feared militia that terrorised African tribes during the Darfur conflict near the Chad border. His paramilitary Rapid Support Forces include Chadian-Arab fighters driven to join the group out of poverty, as well as former anti-government Chadian rebels.
Some of the enmity towards Hemeti stems from a fear that he is seeking a political transition in Chad, where relatives hold senior positions in government. Analysts say he may yet seek to fall back on Chad if he loses the battle with his rival Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
For now, Adré provincial governor Souleyman has faith in his country’s armed forces to prevent any contagion from spreading over the border and beyond. “Chad is a wall for the Sahel,” he said.