Seven soldiers died Monday in the explosion of a mine as their vehicle passed in the Lake Chad region, where armed jihadist groups are active, announced President Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno.
On the borders of Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria, Lake Chad is a vast expanse of water and swamps dotted with hundreds of islets, some of which serve as hideouts for very mobile groups of Boko Haram and the State group. Islamic West Africa (ISWAP, from its English acronym).
Jihadists regularly attack the armies and civilians of the four neighboring countries.
“Seven Chadian soldiers were killed and several others (were) injured”
Monday in the locality of Tchoukou Telia, in the province of Lake Chad, some 200 km north of the capital N’Djamena, announced in the evening on his Facebook page General Mahamat Déby, proclaimed transitional president by the army in April 2021 after the death of his father Idriss Déby Itno, who ruled this vast Sahelian country with an iron fist for more than 30 years.
Military losses down
“Their vehicle jumped on a mine during a patrol,”
explained the head of state, candidate for the May 6 presidential election that he is almost guaranteed to win in the face of a muzzled and repressed opposition, and whose main candidates saw their candidacy invalidated on Sunday.
The army regularly kills or captures jihadists in the lake region but also records losses, although these have fallen considerably for more than a year.
In November 2022, around ten soldiers were killed in the attack on an advanced post but it was in March 2020 that the army suffered the heaviest losses ever recorded in a single attack: around a hundred soldiers had died in one night in the assault on an important base on the Bohoma peninsula.
The Boko Haram insurgency emerged in 2009 in Nigeria - where it has left some 40,000 dead and more than two million displaced since then - before spreading to neighboring countries.
Although the intensity of jihadist attacks on the borders of the four countries has gradually decreased in recent years, ISWAP, which seceded from Boko Haram in 2016, still remains active in the region.