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Unidentified assailants killed at least 40 soldiers during an overnight attack on a military base in the country’s west, Chad’s presidency said Monday.
President Mahamat Deby Itno visited the base in Barkaram, an island in Chad’s Lake region, early morning and announced the launch of a military operation to track the assailants, according to a statement from the presidency.
Chad has long battled with an insurgency in the country’s west, near the border with Nigeria.
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It was not immediately known who was behind the latest attack, but previous attacks in the region have been blamed by the government on the Boko Haram militant group.
In March, an attack the government blamed on Boko Haram killed seven soldiers, reviving fears of violence in the Lake Chad area, after a period of peace following a successful operation launched in 2020 by the Chadian army to destroy the extremist group’s bases there. Schools, mosques and churches reopened and humanitarian organizations returned.
Boko Haram, which launched an insurgency more than a decade ago against Western education, seeks to establish Islamic law in Nigeria’s northeast. The insurgency has spread to West African neighbors including Cameroon, Niger and Chad.
Chad, a country of nearly 18 million people, has been reeling from political turmoil before and after a controversial presidential election that resulted in Deby Itno’s victory. He had led the country as interim president during the period of military rule that followed the death of his father in 2021.
In other news, a Russian drone strike killed a teenager in Kyiv during a nighttime barrage on the Ukrainian capital that lasted for hours, officials said, while five people were reportedly killed in a missile attack on central Ukraine that also left at least 21 injured.
According to Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko, the drone slammed into a 25-story apartment block Friday night in the city’s west, killing a 15-year-old girl and injuring five others. Ukraine’s Emergency Service said 100 people were evacuated following the strike, which damaged several apartments on the building’s upper floors.
Serhii Popko, who heads Kyiv’s local military administration, said that Russian forces overnight pummeled the city for 7 1/2 hours. Air raid sirens wailed throughout the night, and Popko said that Ukrainian air defense shot down up to a dozen Russian drones.
