CHADIAN President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno is “personally” leading an army counter-offensive against Boko Haram after a deadly attack by the insurgent group on a military garrison, the presidency said Thursday.
Insurgents killed around 40 people during a late Sunday to Monday raid on the base in the Lake Chad region, an area plagued by armed groups.
“The president of the republic, the supreme commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno, is still camped on the edge of Lake Chad where he is personally leading operation ‘Haskanite’,” the presidency said on Facebook.
Accompanying the post was a photograph of 40-year-old Deby in uniform.
Deby is holding numerous “meetings, instructing and directing in order to leave no chance to members of Boko Haram”, it added.
Ground and air forces, which have been mobilised for the operation, “have gone into action”, it said in another Facebook post.
A senior officer of the general staff, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that a “hideout” had been spotted by air.
The Insurgents killed around 40 people and wounded 37 others, Prime Minister Abderahim Bireme Hamid announced on Wednesday.
The government’s operation “aims not only to secure our peaceful population” but also to “hunt down, root out and obliterate the capacity for harm of Boko Haram and its affiliates”, the prime minister said.
Chad has also called on the international community to step up its support of counter-terrorism efforts in the region.
The vast Lake Chad region, shared by Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad, is a notorious bolthole for both Boko Haram and its offshoot Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), who set up camps on islands in its marshlands.
Boko Haram launched an insurgency in Nigeria in 2009 that has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced two million, and has since spread to neighbouring countries.
In March 2020, Chad’s armed forces suffered their biggest single-day loss, when around 100 soldiers were killed in their base at Bohoma, on the banks of Lake Chad.
Mahamat Deby was proclaimed head of state by the army in April 2021 after his father Idriss Deby Itno was killed by rebels, having held power for 30 years. He often commanded field operations.