The Central African armed forces have, according to Ndjamena, killed six Chadian soldiers at the Sourou outpostn not far from their common border.
This is a serious accusation that Ndjamena has just made against the Central African Armed Forces (FACA) fighting the armed groups of the “Coalition of Patriots for Change (CPC).”
“The Central African armed forces attacked, on Sunday, May 30, at 5 am, the outpost of Sourou, on Chadian territory, not far from the town of Mbere, and near the Central African border. The attackers, heavily armed, killed a Chadian soldier, wounded five more, and five others were kidnapped to be then executed on the Central African side,” said in a statement, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Chadian transition government, Cherif Mahamat Zene.
“Chad draws the attention of the international community, particularly MINUSCA (UN Peacekeeping Mission in the Central African Republic, which has 12,000 peacekeepers there); the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), on this serious aggression target it,” he added.
“The director general of the Central African Gendarmerie seized the Chadian embassy in Bangui for the Chadian authorities to recover from the village chief of Mbang, the remains of the five soldiers taken prisoner and executed by the Central African army,” Cherif Mahamat Zene added.
At the time of the events, and according to a Chadian security source quoted by some media, the Central African soldiers were pursuing combatants from the 3R (Retour, Reclamation and Rehabilitation) and the Union pour la Paix en Centrafrique (UPC), which are rebel groups belonging to the CPC.
For Ndjamena, this “war crime of extreme gravity and this premeditated murderous attack, planned and carried out inside Chad, for which only the Central African government knows the reasons, could not go unpunished.”
These two Central African neighboring countries have rather strained relationships. Bangui often accuses Ndjamena of backing the rebels who are trying to overthrow the Central African regime.
In the Central African Republic, the rebellion ultimately failed to overthrow President Touadera, who was reelected on December 27, and it was defeated or pushed out of the cities, in particular thanks to the massive intervention of hundreds of Russian paramilitaries from the private security group Wagner, dispatched by Moscow to the rescue of a destitute Central African army.
The region where Sunday’s clashes took place, on the borders of Chad, the Central African Republic and Cameroon, is an area of transhumance and a bastion of the 3Rs on the Central African side, but the latter have dispersed in the countryside in the face of the offensive of the army and their Russian partners. Some have taken refuge near the Chadian border, according to security sources in Bangui.
ARD/cgd/fss/abj/APA