CHAD’S President, Idriss Deby, said on Tuesday, in N’Djamena, that peace talks between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram are still on track.
Deby said the talk was in progress, in spite of a recently released video, which showed Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, saying the Chibok girls had been married to his fighters.
Deby said the statement contradicted the earlier meeting and announcement of a deal to release them.
He said backing the peace talks between Nigeria’s government and Islamist Boko Haram insurgents had become imperative, because of his country’s security.
Deby said the Boko Haram rebels, whose five-year revolt resulted in killing of thousands and constantly causing mayhem in the North-East of Nigeria, had been threatening Chad’s frontiers and disrupting cross-border trade.
He said: “With jihadist fighters prowling Libya’s deserts to the North, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb active in the West and rebels and janjaweed militia battling in Sudan’s Darfur region to its East, Chad already finds itself in the eye of the storm.”
A senior Chadian diplomat said the country had a huge interest in resolving the talks.
He said Boko Haram’s activities in the porous frontier around Lake Chad were difficult to control.
“We are worried that they will come here next,” he said.
Chief Analyst at Crisis Management Group Red 24, Ryan Cummings, said the reason for the Chadian involvement was as a result of the country’s posturing as a regional hegemony.
Cummings said every opportunity must be used to defuse the threat from the Nigerian militant group, whose centre of activity in Borno State was menacingly less than 100 kilometres from the Chadian capital.
A security source in Chad, working for an international organisation, said a couple of months ago, the agency talked about sleeper cells of Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region.
He said as at this moment, “we cannot say that any more, because they have started waking.”
He said in recent months, Chad had changed its attitude to the Boko Haram, as the Chadian forces were stepping up surveillance and had made several arrests.
He said government had also pledged 700 troops for a cross-border force in the Lake Chad region to counter the group, due to start operations this month.
The source noted that France, which uses N’Djamena as a base for its Operation Barkhane against jihadists in the Sahel, was also monitoring the Boko Haram activities in Nigeria and assisted the Chadian army.
Traders across the borders said their livelihood had been affected by the drop in commerce with northern Nigeria and Cameroon.
Abdullah Mega, a 30-year-old shopkeeper in N’Djamena, said a seven-vehicle convoy carrying his shipment of appliances was robbed and torched on the road from the North-Eastern Nigerian town of Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, last year.
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