Word: chadians
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...Ouadi-Doum air base, the stench of death was overpowering. Inside the onetime Libyan stronghold, which was overrun by Chadian troops in March, the unburied bodies of five Libyan pilots lay in a pit. Nearby, some 30 Soviet and Czech jet fighters, half of them unscathed, glittered in the sun. The aircraft were a small part of the advanced Soviet bloc weaponry that the forces of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi left behind as they fled. The value of the abandoned materiel, along with the base itself and Libyan armaments lost in other desert battles, was estimated at nearly...
...attack proved swift, brutal and decisive. In just two hours, Chadian soldiers routed Libyan troops from an airfield that had served as Libya's main support base in northern Chad since 1984, the year after Libya invaded its neighbor in force. The exuberant Chadians claimed they had killed 1,269 enemy troops and taken 438 prisoners while losing just 29 soldiers. Chadian officials also said that in the hasty retreat last week from the air base at Ouadi-Doum, the Libyans left behind a trove of Soviet-made equipment, including combat aircraft, tanks and rocket launchers. The defeat, stated...
...battles at Ouadi-Doum and Faya-Largeau handed Libyan Strongman Colonel Muammar Gaddafi one of the most ignominious defeats of his 18-year rule. State-run Chadian radio hailed the capture of the 12,500-ft. airstrip at Ouadi-Doum as the "beginning of the end of Gaddafi's expansionist dreams." The debacle not only delivered a near fatal blow to Libya's occupation of northern Chad but also damaged Gaddafi's standing at home, where Libyans are already grumbling about a sickly economy that is suffering from the slump in oil prices...
Gaddafi's military campaign began to sag last October, when he had a falling-out with Goukouni Oueddei, a former Chadian President and leader of rebel forces battling the present government. That rupture prompted most of the guerrillas to shift their loyalties from Gaddafi to Chadian President Hissene Habre and his French-backed army. Habre, who received $15 million in U.S. emergency aid late last year, began a major drive against the Libyans in December. The effort paid off one month later, when government forces captured the Libyan base at Fada, in northeastern Chad. According to U.S. and French officials...
...whatever reason, Gaddafi's break with Goukouni caused most of the Chadian rebels to shift their loyalties from Gaddafi to Habre, thereby fundamentally changing the political role of the Libyan forces in northern Chad. Says a Western diplomat in N'Djamena: "What you have now is an invasion of Chad by Libya." Much of the credit for Chad's recent achievements goes to Habre, a French-trained lawyer who has managed to create a sense of unity in a country that has never known the meaning of the word. Buoyed by these successes, the soft-spoken Habre sounded unusually confident...