Chad rebels flee to safety in Sudan – minister

Oct 26, 2006 (N’DJAMENA) — A rebel convoy which attacked two towns in Chad has fled to Sudan after the army sent troops to face it, Chad’s defence minister said on Thursday.

Bichara Issa Djadallah denied reports that Chad had purged the military top brass after the rebels briefly seized the town of Goz Beida near the Sudan border on Sunday and then attacked Am Timan further west as they moved deeper into the country.

President Idriss Deby’s government, hit by army defections to the rebels during the last year, said on Wednesday reinforcements were sent to the Am Timan region but the rebels withdrew and government troops retook the town without a fight.

“We entered Am Timan yesterday … and the rebels fled toward Sudan … at this time, their first vehicles have already arrived there. We are in pursuit,” the minister said.

Former coup leader Deby has repeatedly accused Khartoum of backing the rebels, saying Sudan’s Arab government is trying to export its “fundamentalist system” to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Sudan denies the charge.

Fighting in Sudan’s Darfur region, which has killed tens of thousands of people since 2003 and displaced more than two million, has often spilled over into arid, oil-producing Chad.

This week’s attacks recalled a lightning assault on N’Djamena in April, launched from the east by rebels who raced over the desert in pickup trucks from the Sudan border. Hundreds were killed in the capital before the army took control.

The rebel coalition, the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD), demands the resignation of Deby, who seized power in a 1990 insurgency and won a new five-year term at elections in May boycotted by the opposition.

The defence minister acknowledged the rebels had “sophisticated arms”, pointing to a ground-to-air missile fired at a French military reconnaissance plane on Monday, which missed after the aircraft took precautionary measures.

“That does not change the balance of power. The Chadian army is very solid,” he said.

The rebels had clashed with a battalion of the Chadian army at Am Timan before taking control of the town, Djadallah said. He added that casualty figures were not yet available.

(Reuters)