At least 72 Chadian soldiers wounded in clashes in the northwestern Tibesti gold mining province have been transferred to the military hospital in N’Djamena since fighting broke out two weeks ago, a military source told AFP on Wednesday. Government troops have been engaged in clashes since October 14 across Tibesti, an arid mountain region bordering Libya and Niger that holds extensive gold reserves.
The fighting began near Miski, where the army’s Mining Brigade, the unit tasked with securing gold sites and clearing illegal miners, clashed with a local self defence committee near the Awa mining zone on October 14. The army’s initial account reported two officers killed and nine security personnel wounded in that first confrontation, and demanded the committee disarm immediately, warning that refusal would be treated as rebellion.
The two sides give incompatible accounts of who broke the peace, and neither has been independently verified. The self defence committee accused the Mining Brigade of heavy weapons fire on October 13, illegal gold extraction and unauthorised military presence, calling the actions violations of the April 2025 peace accord and of government commitments signed on October 3, 2026. The army frames the committee’s refusal to surrender its weapons as the breach.
That dispute is the jurisdiction story. Tibesti’s artisanal gold has been contested for a decade between the central state, which wants regulated mining and the revenue that comes with it, and Toubou local groups who control ground the state cannot routinely police. A peace accord that collapses into two weeks of fighting with at least 72 soldiers wounded is no longer a local security incident; it is evidence that the settlement over who owns Tibesti gold was never settled.
No casualty figure for the self defence side has been published in the reporting available, and the cumulative military figure rests on a single unnamed source. Both limits are flagged in this story’s data note, and the count should be treated as the army’s account until an independent source can work in the region.