The first time I saw Chad’s late president, Idriss Deby Itno, was in September 2016 in Togo. As chairperson of the African Union, he was leading discussions at a continental summit on maritime safety. That evening, at a reception on a French military vessel, anchored in the Port of Lome, Deby arrived in a flowing boubou (a loose-fitting West African robe) with a cane in hand, exuding confidence. On the ship’s deck, amid foie gras and fine French wine, Deby shared an easy camaraderie with French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian — each addressing the other by his first name, as if no other African president was present.
What struck me, apart from this absurd evening on a French military ship in the heart of the Gulf of Guinea, was Deby’s undeniable charisma. Slender and upright, he carried himself like a monarch among his court, rebuking anyone who dared to contradict him. He never made a secret of his admiration for the French army, which trained him and accompanied him throughout his life. On this ship’s deck, surrounded by officers in gala dress, he was at the heart of it.
At the time, he had just been reelected for his fifth consecutive term. Although the Chadian opposition cried foul and disputed the results, no fewer than 14 African presidents and Le Drian were in N’Djamena a month before the Togo gathering to congratulate him, and not a single remark was made about the despotic nature of the election.
Now on this ship, laughing and enjoying the French cheese, he was reaping the rewards of a diplomatic strategy put in place since he came to power in 1990: turning his army into a first-class diplomatic tool, in exchange for unfailing support for his regime from the international community. The Deby recipe for diplomacy was to be seen as a symbol of stability in a tormented region in order to secure Chad’s own autocracy.
With France, he practiced it with peerless brio for 30 years. His death in 2021 exposed the web of alliances that had kept his regime in power. His close ties with France made Chad a key player in regional stability and the fight against militant insurgents. But his death highlighted how dependent his system was on foreign aid. Since his son, Mahamat Idriss Deby, took power, Chad has been at a crossroads, facing rising internal unrest while dealing with shifting global dynamics. Now, with Mahamat setting Jan. 31, 2025 as the deadline for French troops to leave Chad, the date marks a pivotal moment in the country’s evolving foreign relations.
Idriss Deby’s strategy of using military power and alliances helped him hold on to power in Chad while making his regime central to France’s interests in the region, a setup that faced serious questions after his death.
From the France-backed coup that put him in power in 1990 until his death in April 2021, Africa’s most seasoned autocrat developed an almost flawless model for maintaining his rule. He used his army as an unstoppable bargaining chip to stay in power, finance his regime and protect his interests. He constantly sent it to fight other wars in Africa to keep the Chadian liner afloat, even as it was rocked by those who dreamed of overthrowing him.
During Deby’s reign, Chadian soldiers fought in Nigeria and Cameroon against Boko Haram, in Mali and Niger against al Qaeda, and in the Central African Republic for Chad’s own influence. He used these deployments to get military advantage, money and unfailing Western support.
“By sending his troops abroad, Deby had made himself useful, if not indispensable, to these countries, as well as to France and the other Western powers obsessed with the fight against terrorism,” International Crisis Group’s Chad analyst Charles Bouessel told New Lines. “This military diplomacy, which relied on Chad’s only functional institution, the army, had enabled him to extend his influence regionally and internationally while avoiding Western pressure and criticism over his corrupt and nepotistic governance.”
Ironically, the Chadian army has always been on the front line outside of the country’s borders, but the palace has always relied on its partners, mainly France, to provide security at home. Rather than looking the other way, the West became Deby’s lifeline.
In 2008, when rebels reached the capital, French special forces intervened to secure the presidential palace. Jean-Marc Gadoullet, a soldier, recounted the episode in the 2016 book “Secret Agent” (“Agent Secret”). In February 2019, another rebel column entered Chad aiming to overthrow the regime.
Deby again turned to France for air support. French fighter jets bombed the rebels. “We prevented the 50 or so armed pickups of the Union of Resistance Forces from reaching N’Djamena,” Le Drian told the French parliament. But Gassim Cherif, a rebel leader at the time and now vice president of Chad’s parliament, questioned this intervention.
When we discussed the matter in late 2024, Cherif maintained his position: “Is it France’s role to interfere in Chad’s internal politics? Obviously not. But they did it multiple times over the years.”
Chad’s involvement in the Sahel is without doubt the best example of Deby’s “military diplomacy.” By 2021, the Sahel’s escalating conflicts had made Chad indispensable. Mali’s president had just been swept away by a coup, and rumors were swirling in Burkina Faso. Along with Niger, these countries were threatened by the two-headed jihadist hydra of al Qaeda and the Islamic State group.
Moreover, their populations found their leaders inept and lost faith in their army’s capabilities. To counter the growing influence of the jihadist groups, the G5-Sahel Joint Force, funded by the international community, was supposed to step up. It was composed of Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Chad, which were theoretically required to provide battalions stationed within their territories but equipped by the force.
Despite the presence of French soldiers, U.N. peacekeepers and the G5-Sahel Joint Force, the situation in the volatile tri-border region of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger spiraled out of control. Chad, which was already deployed in Mali under the U.N. banner, was asked to help.
”In Paris, they believed that an additional Chadian battalion deployed in the tri-border region could make a difference,” a French diplomat, who requested anonymity, revealed. “The French convinced Deby to deploy his troops there, but as always, he sold them out.”
Negotiations went on for months. Initially, the European Union had been asked to fund the deployment but refused. France then attempted to rally regional partners, but they hesitated. Eventually, France funded the operation itself. Moreover, its embassy in Niger and the French army provided these 1,200 soldiers with ammunition, gas and medicine.
“Deby always managed to get what he wanted,” the French insider bitterly recalled, pointing out how, just a few years earlier in 2019, France even lent Chad funds to pay civil servants and pensions.
On many occasions, Deby asked Chad’s partners to overstep their prerogatives. They never blinked — except one time, in April 2021.
On April 21, Chadians were awaiting the presidential election results held two weeks earlier. A rebel group, the Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT), had announced the launch of an attack on Chad from Libya on the day of the vote. At first contained in the north, their column gradually came closer to the capital. There, few really cared: Backed by the French army, the Chadian army, led on the ground by their president and army chief, had defeated the rebels every other time they attempted such an assault.
Deby attempted the same this time while, in parallel, asking his ally for support. But France refused to carry out airstrikes on the FACT column.
Thousands of turbaned soldiers clashed in a bloody battle between the national army and rebels. Deby was killed in combat while leading his soldiers on the front lines against the rebels advancing from the north toward N’Djamena.
It is impossible to say whether the French decision was one of the factors that led to his death. Yet it was the first time in Deby’s reign that France had not thrown its weight behind Chad in a decisive battle.
Deby’s death was a seismic event for Chad, comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall for Eastern Europe. For a moment, the country seemed poised for change. Suddenly, everything became possible again for the people of Chad. They began dreaming of democracy, free elections and the end of autocracy.
But the dream quickly dissipated. The announcement of Deby’s death was delayed and created an unusual quiet in N’Djamena, Paris and Washington. The lack of immediate information left many wondering what was happening. When I arrived in N’Djamena from Mali, where I was living at the time, to cover the events, the streets were empty. A curfew had just been imposed; military checkpoints and tanks were everywhere.
“The [die] seems to have been cast immediately,” Sali Bakari, a N’Djamena University professor watching the funeral on TV that day, told me. “We were at the elections, we were awaiting the results of the vote. Instead, we got tanks on the streets.”
On April 19, the day after his death, Deby was declared the winner of the election with 79.32% of the vote. The following day, officers announced on state TV that Deby was dead and that his son would take over as interim leader. The decision immediately sparked a debate about the legitimacy of this succession.
On April 23, 2021, Deby’s funeral took place on Place de la Nation, N’Djamena’s main square. The new president, Mahamat Idriss Deby, 37, was slouched in a presidential chair that seemed too big for him. He wore a mask over his nose to protect against COVID-19. According to protocol, the chairperson of the African Union, Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, was supposed to be seated to his right, but he was relegated to the second row. The only Western head of state present, Emmanuel Macron, took his place. Macron’s presence and rushed endorsement fueled further questions about foreign influence.
“France will never allow anyone to question the stability and integrity of Chad,” he said in his speech. At the start of his term, the same Macron promised a Copernican revolution in relations between France and former French African colonies. He certainly didn’t keep his word that day.
At the time, Chad wielded large influence over its partners: Chadian soldiers were deployed in the U.N. mission to Mali, in the G5-Sahel Joint Force in Niger, in the Multinational Joint Task Force to fight Boko Haram militants in both Cameroon and Nigeria. In short, Chad was too useful a friend for Macron to nitpick over its election or democracy.
At a press conference, the EU’s lead diplomat, Josep Borrell, said the same thing in other words: “We must help Chad and go beyond political considerations.”
As the nation grappled with the sudden shift in leadership, public dissent began to simmer.
Four days later, protests erupted and were met with deadly force. In a small street in Chagoua district, in eastern N’Djamena, an armed police pickup fired into the crowd. People, including journalists covering the protest, hid in the surrounding houses.
These protests, fueled by anger over France’s perceived complicity in Chad’s leadership transition, reflected a deeper frustration with the country’s history of French intervention, a presence that has shaped Chad’s political landscape for decades.
“We’re fed up, fed up, fed up, with the monarchical dynasty and France, it’s been the same thing for 60 years,” a student, Ali, told me then. Her young brother had been killed in the protests a few hours earlier. Four more were killed in town that day.
Chad’s history has been shaped by near-constant French military presence. From 1960 to 1965, French forces administered northern Chad, followed by five military operations, making Chad the country with the highest number of French operations abroad in the past 70 years. The penultimate Operation Epervier lasted from 1986 to 2014 and was then replaced by Operation Barkhane until 2022. Even after Barkhane officially ended, French forces remained in Chad under the vague banner of “French Forces in the Sahel.”
French soldiers were a familiar sight in N’Djamena, whether on duty or relaxing at hotel pools on weekends. In early 2024, asked by the press about the future of the thousand-soldier contingent based in N’Djamena, a French presidential special envoy said, “We have to stay, and of course we will.”
Unlike the American public’s scrutiny of wars in the Middle East, French citizens have largely ignored their government’s military entanglements in Africa. Questions raised by a few parliamentarians were always dismissed with vague answers. French officials always justified their Sahel deployments as essential for preventing jihadist attacks in Europe, despite no recorded attack originating from the region.
During the last years I spent working in the Sahel, I covered numerous demonstrations by civil organizations calling for the departure of French troops, which were present in no fewer than six West African countries. The West largely accused these organizations of being manipulated by foreign powers, which is possible for some, but I met dozens of young Sahelians who, being born after the decolonization era, were calling for a new, egalitarian relationship with France.
Driven by those young Sahelians, protests in the Sahel against French troops grew.
“In fact, we don’t really understand why there are a thousand French soldiers here, when all we see on French television is people saying that you have money and debt problems: Take them back, it costs money!” Ali told me in February 2024.
Last February, when the presidential guard killed an opposition politician — the president’s own cousin, Yaya Dillo — in his home during a punitive military operation, I was on the next street. The shots rang out all afternoon in Klemat, the wealthy district of N’Djamena where Dillo was brutally killed two months before an election in which he wanted to run. A photo of him dead with a bullet in his head circulated on social networks.
None of Chad’s partners flinched.
“We’ve been waiting for France to react. … We’ve reached the bottom of the abyss, and it’s remaining silent! We want France to act in such a way that the Chadians understand that it is supporting a democratic process,” Soumaine Adoum, one of the leaders of Wakit Tama, the main civil society coalition in Chad, told me then.
“France has a sword of Damocles hanging over its head” in Chad, Bakari predicted at the time. “At any moment, its African partners can decide to turn their backs on it.”
That, Bakari added, explained France’s cautious stance in Chad, which was soon tested under Mahamat Idriss Deby’s leadership. While leveraging his father’s strategy of using Chad’s stability as a bargaining chip, tensions with France came to a breaking point. A Boko Haram attack in late 2024 highlighted the alliance’s fragility, exposing cracks in the two countries’ once unquestionable military cooperation.
Mahamat Idriss Deby, who was officially elected president in 2024 after a three-year transition, inherited the complex legacy of his father’s diplomacy. After coming to power, he perpetuated the same strategy as his father, using Chad’s stability as leverage with his partners in a region where all his neighbors are in turmoil.
In his public speeches, he repeats the line that made the front page of the pan-African media outlet Jeune Afrique in 2023: “We saved Chad from chaos.” Like his father, Mahamat Idriss Deby has, so far, used this refrain to avoid criticism from Chad’s partners over its domestic policies, which are considered authoritarian by opponents.
The older Deby’s rule involved a fine balance. Rather than turn against France, he engaged in negotiation. His power relied on alliances, especially with France, but his sudden death exposed the fragility of this dependency.
A turning point was reached late in 2024. Boko Haram attacked the Chadian army in the Lake Chad region. More than 40 Chadian soldiers were killed. French fighter jets flew over the area, at the request of the Chadians. But, as in 2021, they did not strike.
“These planes were supposed to be our life insurance, (but) if the French don’t want to strike anymore, what good are they?” a Chadian official told me then on condition of anonymity.
A few weeks later, the military agreements between Chad and France were broken off by the Chadian president. In December 2024, French fighter jets withdrew from N’Djamena, symbolizing the end of an era.
A few days later, a Russian-registered plane that has been used by the Wagner Group was spotted delivering material to the Chadian army in Faya Largeau, northern Chad. This event had not been publicized by Chad or anyone else, and at the time of publication it was impossible to say definitively whether it was a Wagner plane.
If the younger Deby maintains that his primary objective is the “full and complete” sovereignty of Chad, he is de facto extending alliances, navigating between Paris, Moscow, Budapest, Ankara and Abu Dhabi.
“This willingness of diplomatic opening to other powers is the expression of a new era and true independence,” Bello Bakary Mana, publisher of one of the main private media outlets in Chad, IAL Tchad, told New Lines.
Lately, Chad has been accused by American officials of allowing the United Arab Emirates to fly drones to back the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group fighting Sudan’s military, from an airfield located next to Sudan’s border, according to The New York Times in late 2024.
The year before, the UAE granted Chad an enormous loan of $1.5 billion (Chad’s annual budget is $1.8 billion). In November 2024, another $500 million loan was provided.
”Chad has always been the preserve of a diplomatically powerful country, France. We need to diversify diplomatic investments to get better returns,” Bakary Mana added.
If Mahamat Idriss Deby’s father chose one main ally, his son has chosen several. Only time will tell whether the diplomatic wager that he has adopted will pay off. For the moment, it appears that it does.
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