On Nov. 28, Chadian Foreign Minister Abderaman Koulamallah released a communique announcing that Chad would terminate its military cooperation agreement with France. The move reportedly came as a big surprise to French authorities; French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot had just left the country hours earlier without any indication that such a move was in the cards.
The current French military presence in Chad, numbering over 1,000 troops, dates from 1986. But apart from several short intervals, French troops have been in the country nearly continuously since their colonial-era conquest of the region around Lake Chad in 1900. Since Chad’s independence in 1960, French troops have served to protect successive governments against armed overthrow, while benefiting from a central geographical location for the projection of French power elsewhere on the continent. Many generations of French officers have served in the country, and the French military has a strong institutional attachment to its presence there.
The last time France intervened directly to protect the government was in 2019, when it launched airstrikes against rebels moving into Chad from neighboring Libya. However, French forces also played important logistical and intelligence-sharing roles in preventing rebels from overthrowing the Chadian government in April 2021, though then-President Idriss Deby was killed in combat at the time. French President Emmanuel Macron attended Deby’s funeral, where he aggressively asserted France’s commitment to the survival of Chad’s regime, now headed by Idriss Deby’s son, Mahamat Idriss Deby.