Play as · WW3 2026 · L1 · Déby Continuity · Sudan Border

Chad - 2026

Chad is governed by Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno - son of Idriss Déby Itno (the previous president killed in April 2021 in fighting against rebel forces in the north), confirmed in the contested May 2024 election that the political opposition has refused to accept. Population about 18M, GDP around $30B PPP. The country is the principal Sahel-adjacent state that has not joined the AES confederation, has retained the French-aligned security cooperation including the residual French-military presence at the Adji Kossei airbase in N'Djamena, and has been the principal recipient of the Sudan-civil-war refugee outflow (about 1.2 million Sudanese refugees concentrated in eastern Chad, particularly the Adre and Tine areas). The strategic identity is the Déby-family-political-continuity state with the post-2021 succession-managed institutional architecture, the multi-front security operations against jihadist and rebel armed groups, and the residual French and broader Western security cooperation that the Sahel-juntas environment has compressed elsewhere.

Starting position

The Chadian Armed Forces are about 35,000 active personnel, oriented toward the multi-front border-defense operations (the Sudanese frontier with the refugee crisis and the cross-border RSF activity, the Libyan frontier with the periodic rebel-incursion patterns, the Lake Chad area with the Boko Haram and ISWAP operations, the Cameroonian and Central African Republic frontiers), and the substantial regional-cooperation deployments through the Multinational Joint Task Force, the G5 Sahel (now substantially restructured), and the African Union framework. Equipment is mixed and aged, with French and US bilateral training and supply continuing, plus selected Chinese and other procurement. The Adji Kossei airbase residual French presence is about 1,000 personnel, substantially reduced from previous levels but operationally significant.

What turns the campaign

What Chad under the Déby government wants is the political-institutional consolidation of the post-2024-election architecture preserved against the political opposition's continuing contestation, the Sudan refugee-crisis response funded at the scale the humanitarian situation requires (the 1.2-million-plus refugee population is the largest in Africa relative to host-population), the residual French and Western security cooperation preserved against the regional Sahel-juntas pressure to break with the post-colonial security architecture, the multi-front jihadist-and-rebel security operations sustained at the operational tempo the situation requires, and the regional cooperation through the Lake Chad Basin Commission and the Multinational Joint Task Force institutionalized. What Chad fears is a Sudanese RSF cross-border operation that exceeds Chadian containment capacity (the post-2023 RSF activity in eastern Chad has been substantial and politically sensitive given Mahamat Déby's family-political ties to certain RSF actors), a renewed northern rebel offensive on the FACT-style 2021 model, and a domestic political-institutional crisis if the post-2024-election political settlement breaks down at scale.

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