NDJAMENA (Chad), Feb 3: Fierce fighting with tanks and helicopter strikes rocked the Chad capital for a second day on Sunday as rebels surrounded President Idriss Deby Itno in his palace and hundreds of foreigners fled the country.
With international aid organisations reporting bodies in the streets and hundreds of people wounded, anti-tank and automatic weapons fire was heard around the presidential palace, where Deby has been holed up since Friday.
French Defence Minister Herve Morin said the new fighting could be “crucial” in the battle for control of the former French colony in Central Africa.
The offensive by three rebel commanders has opened up a new conflict next to Sudan’s strife torn Darfur region and the deployment of a European peacekeeping mission in Chad and Central African Republic has been suspended, Morin said in Paris.
Chadian army helicopters attacked a rebel column near the national radio station headquarters in the capital. They also fired at other rebel vehicles in the city.
An army tank defending the entrance to the national radio fired at anyone who showed themselves on the street, a witness told AFP.
“We did not take the airport so as not to hinder the evacuation of foreign nationals and now the French army is letting these helicopters take off and attack us,” a rebel spokesman, Abderaman Khoulamallah, told AFP.
The fighting closed in on the airport and forced a temporary halt to the airlift of foreigners. But the French military said a Hercules plane carrying 104 people left Sunday morning in calm in the unrest.
A French foreign ministry statement said 217 French nationals and 297 foreigners had been flown out of Ndjamena.
The United Nations said it would evacuate all UN personnel and US embassy staff were taken to the French military base on Sunday to be flown out, military sources said.
China, a major investor in Chad’s growing oil industry, was organising an airlift for 210 Chinese and two Taiwan nationals to Cameroon, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported.
Germans, Belgians, Spanish, Portuguese, Egyptian and Armenian nationals were also airlifted out.
The French ministry said about 400 foreigners were still grouped at two hotels, the French international school and two other emergency assembly points.
But Deby, who seized at the head of a similar rebel force in 1990, refused a French offer to help him leave the country.
France sent an extra 150 troops to help with the evacuations and French President Nicolas Sarkozy broke off from celebrating his wedding on Saturday to twice telephone Deby.
No death toll from the fighting has been given but a UN security service official said there were a lot of bodies in the streets, “some burned, some just hacked” to death.
The Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF -- Doctors Without Borders) aid group said hundreds of civilians had been wounded, but it was unable to give a death toll. About 400 people had fled across the western border into Cameroon, according to the UN refugee agency.
The new fighting dashed hopes of a ceasefire which Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi was reportedly trying to secure.
The rebel force in pickup trucks started moving across the desert from a base near the eastern border with Sudan on Monday but major fighting only erupted on Friday as they neared the capital.
The Chad army’s chief of staff, General Daoud Soumain, was killed in Friday’s fighting, officials said.
Rebels took over large sections of Ndjamena on Saturday after intense fighting. But a military source said government forces were trying to force the anti-Deby rebels back and rebel spokesman Koulamallah acknowledged that “(government) tanks have pushed us back a bit.” French military sources said there were about 2,000 rebel fighters and that Deby has at least 2,000-3,000 troops.
The rebels were helped by Sudanese helicopters and Antonov military aircraft in an attack Sunday on the eastern town of Adre, the local government prefect, General Abadi Sair, told AFP.
In Khartoum, this was denied by a Sudan’s state Minister for Foreign Affairs Sammani al-Wassila who called the Chad fighting an “internal affair”.
Chad’s Foreign Minister Amad Allam-Mi has accused Sudan of masterminding the rebel offensive in a bid to halt a planned European peacekeeping force (EUFOR) in Chad and Central African Republic to protect refugees mostly from Darfur.
The French defence minister said the EUFOR deployment, already held up several times, had now been put back to Wednesday but added: “Nobody has the intention of giving up this operation.”—AFP
