'Chadian music' wakes war-weary border town
Source: Reuters
(Updates with casualties, comments from MSF official) By Emmanuel Braun ADRE, Chad, Feb 6 (Reuters) - It started with the boom of a single artillery round, which set off ripples of rocket fire and the chatter of heavy machineguns. A dawn concerto of war woke this scruffy Chadian border town of mud-brick houses and dusty streets on Tuesday, sending the few residents who were out scuttling back to their homes. Others peered anxiously from doorways, looking east toward the "wadi" or dry river bed that marks the border between Adre in Chad and Sudan's conflict-torn Darfur region. The gunfire came from outside the town and locals feared it might herald another lightning raid by rebels opposed to Chad President Idriss Deby who attacked Adre last week in their relentless hit-and-run campaign against the Chadian army. But half an hour after it started, the firing was over and people, some smiling nervously, returned to their daily business in this garrison town that has grown accustomed to conflict. "That's the Chadian music, we're used to it. Adre is like that. We're on the frontier and we have war here all the time," one resident told a Reuters TV reporter in Adre. Locals said initially a single artillery round had come in from the direction of Sudan, triggering a furious response from the Chadian army, which opened up with multiple rocket launchers and heavy machineguns. Military sources said later the rebels had delivered a message to the army garrison, challenging them to come out of the town to fight so the civilian population could be spared. Officials at the local hospital run by French charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said four people -- a man, two women and a child -- were killed in Tuesday's exchanges of fire at Tileha on the southern outskirts of Adre. Inside the hospital, a child lay injured with a head wound, surrounded by family members. DESERT WAR Last week, a column of rebels using the weapons-mounted pickup trucks that are the staple of warfare in the desert and scrubland of eastern Chad attacked Adre, triggering several hours of heavy fighting. Both sides claimed to have inflicted heavy casualties and Chad's government said the attack came from neighbouring Sudan. Chad's national army, aided by fierce militia fighters known as Tora Bora, has ringed Adre with tanks, armoured vehicles and rocket launchers to ward off future attacks. Deby says Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's government is arming the rebels seeking to overthrow him and allowing them to use Sudan's western region of Darfur to launch attacks on both Chad and the Central African Republic. Khartoum denies this. Adre lies 170 km (106 miles) east of Abeche, a hub for international humanitarian operations in eastern Chad where U.N.-run camps house 230,000 Sudanese refugees who have fled over three years of political and ethnic conflict in Darfur. Fighting between Chadian rebels and the army, raids by Sudanese Arab Janjaweed militia and ethnic clashes between Arab and non-Arab communities have turned east Chad into a war zone and forced more than 100,000 local civilians from their homes. U.N. aid agencies and humanitarian NGOs have had to withraw expatriate staff from some conflict areas and they say the unrelenting insecurity is badly disrupting their efforts to help thousands of civilians in need. Local humanitarian staff are sanguine about the dangers. "This is the norm in Chad, you live with it," said MSF Adre's assistant administrator Jean-Claude Beassoum, a Chadian, standing at the MSF compound where a sign, showing an automatic rifle with a red cross over it, bans the entry of firearms. "When your time comes, it comes," Beassoum shrugged. As Sudan fiercely resists the idea of allowing a strong force of U.N. "blue-helmet" peacekeeping troops into Darfur, the United Nations is looking at the possibility of sending a separate force to secure Chad's eastern border and protect civilians, refugees and humanitarian workers there.
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