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French Prime Minister Jean Castex, who arrived in Chad on Thursday to spend New Year’s Eve with French troops, said he met with Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno to discuss “stepping up” the fight against the jihadism.
“We had a very fruitful and very deep exchange,” Castex told reporters, after meeting Deby in Amdjarass, near Chad’s eastern border with Sudan.
“We talk about ways to intensify (bilateral) cooperation, with a common goal, which is the fight against terrorism, whether in the Sahel or in the Lake Chad area,” he told reporters.
Chad is one of the so-called G5 Sahel countries that is waging a bloody jihadist campaign on the southern edge of the Sahara.
It is also dealing with attacks in the Lake Chad area in the south by insurgents from neighboring Nigeria.
France intervened militarily in the Sahel in 2013 to help drive jihadists out of northern Mali. The insurgents subsequently regrouped and advanced into central Mali, an ethnically volatile area, before mounting attacks on Niger and Burkina Faso.
France’s 5,100-man anti-jihadist Operation Barkhane mission lost three soldiers in Mali on Monday when their armored vehicle collided with a roadside mine.
Castex was due to pay tribute to them in a speech Thursday afternoon at Barkhane command headquarters at Camp Kossei, near the Chadian capital N’Djamena, French officials said.
He would then have a New Years Eve dinner with some of the 800 soldiers at the base.
On Friday, Castex is scheduled to meet with French troops stationed in the northern oasis of Faya-Largeau and in Abeche in the east.
In other remarks on Thursday, Castex referred to a likely summit in N’Djamena of the G5 Sahel and France, the main sponsor of the coalition, in January or February.
Deby “will go to France shortly” to talk with President Emmanuel Macron “to discuss the range of perspectives” for the meeting, he said, without elaborating.
The N’Djamena summit will mark the first anniversary of a meeting in Pau, southwestern France, that reformulated the strategy.
Military commanders have signaled a number of tactical successes since the campaign shifted its focus to the anarchic “triple border” zone where the borders of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso converge.
However, France is also looking to the Sahel countries, whose armed forces are often poorly equipped and trained, to further their role and thus ease the burden on Barkhane.
Chad, at the Pau summit, promised to send a battalion of troops to the triple border area, but its deployment has been delayed.
