Chad claims to have gotten rid of Boko Haram

There is no longer a single element of Boko Haram on Chadian territory, the Chadian government spokesman told AFP on Monday, confirming the message of President Idriss Déby Itno less than two weeks after the launch of 'an offensive against the jihadist group. "Across the island region, there is not a single jihadist," said the president this weekend from the Lac province, where he went in mid-March to lead a response after a Boko Haram attack on the Bohoma peninsula. A hundred Chadian soldiers were then killed.

The Chadian authorities give no details on the troops deployed or on the number of Boko Haram members killed or arrested. "We are in the process of cross-checking information from different operating sites before giving an assessment," said the minister of the commission and spokesman for the government of Chad, Oumar Yaya Hissein. According to the president, the jihadists who are still free "entered either Niger, Nigeria or Cameroon" . The members of Boko Haram would therefore have left the cloud of islets scattered over Lake Chad, a vast expanse of swampy water on the border of the four countries.

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President Déby does not hide his frustration with his three neighbors, with whom Chad has been fighting Boko Haram since 2015 in the Multinational Joint Force (MNJTF). "Chad alone is able to bear the brunt of the war against Boko Haram (...) I met the FMM commander and asked him to take over," he said.

Despite the triumphant tone of the Chadian government, the International Crisis Group (ICG) believes that the fight against Boko Haram is "far from over" . With 6,000 soldiers deployed in the Lake Chad area before the attack in mid-March, "the Chadian authorities only benefit from limited room for maneuver to reinforce these troops," wrote ICG in a commentary.

The jihadist group Boko Haram, born in 2009 in Nigeria, had intensified its attacks in the lake area in recent months, pushing Chad to redeploy in January 1,200 of its soldiers, integrated into the FMM, who had passed from Nigerian territory to the ground Chadian.