Idriss Deby Itno was killed on 20 April 2021, reportedly at the front, fighting a rebel column that had driven south from Libya. Within hours a Transitional Military Council of thirteen general officers had named his thirty-seven-year-old son head of state. The constitution was suspended. The government and the National Assembly were dissolved.
Three days later, Emmanuel Macron stood at the funeral in N’Djamena alongside the presidents of Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania. Before the ceremony they met the son. A French presidential official described a unity of views and joint support for a civilian-military transition and for the stability of the region. In July the new head of state was received at the Elysee.
A military succession that set aside a constitution was endorsed by a Western democracy inside seventy-two hours, in public, at a funeral.
That is not hypocrisy exactly, and calling it hypocrisy obscures what it actually reveals. France was not endorsing Mahamat Deby. It was protecting an arrangement, and the arrangement was more important than the name attached to it. Chad’s principal export has never been cotton or oil. It is a location, and the willingness to let other people use it, which is the most durable commodity in this entire trade.
What Chad actually sells
Strip the diplomatic language away and the Deby state has been running a four-product business for thirty-five years.
The first product is basing. Chad hosts foreign military infrastructure. France maintained a continuous presence from independence in 1960, formalised as Operation Epervier from 1986 and folded into Operation Barkhane from 2014, with roughly a thousand personnel, Mirage fighters, a tanker, intelligence and logistics support, and bases at N’Djamena, Faya-Largeau and Abeche. The United States kept a small special forces element. When the Sahel expelled France from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in succession, Chad became the last foothold.
The second is troops. The Chadian army is genuinely capable and has been deployed where Western partners wanted capability without Western casualties: against jihadist groups in Mali, in the multinational force around Lake Chad against Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province, and across the G5 Sahel framework. Chad exported soldiering, and it did so with a force that had learned its trade in the desert campaigns of the 1980s against a better-equipped enemy. The institutional memory of the Toyota War is a real asset and it is what Chad’s partners were actually buying.
The third is transit. Chad sits on the corridor connecting Libya, Sudan and Central Africa, and it has airfields on that corridor. What lands at them, and what leaves overland afterwards, has been the subject of United Nations reporting. Transit is the product with the highest margin and the lowest visibility, because it consumes no Chadian resources and requires nothing except that the relevant officials look at a different part of the sky.
The fourth is the buffer itself. Chad borders Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger, which is a list of problems. A functioning Chadian state is a wall between several of them, and everyone with an interest in those problems not spreading has an interest in paying for the wall.
Notice what all four have in common. None of them is a good. All of them are access, and access is a rentable asset that regenerates. Cotton sold is cotton gone. Permission granted in 2024 can be granted again in 2026 to somebody else, and can be granted to two parties at once if their interests do not directly collide. That last property is the one the word franchise is doing work to capture. The arrangement is non-exclusive by default, and the Deby state has run French, American, Emirati and at various points Israeli, Russian and Turkish relationships simultaneously.
The French account, and what the Deby state charged for it
The relationship ran for sixty-four years and ended in a single sentence.
On 28 November 2024, Chad’s foreign ministry announced the termination of the defence cooperation agreement revised in 2019, stating that after more than six decades of independence the country wished to fully assert its sovereignty and redefine its strategic partnerships.
The staging was deliberate. The announcement came on the Feast of the Proclamation of the Republic, and it came hours after the French foreign minister had visited N’Djamena and departed. Local sources described everyone as taken by surprise. Paris had spent that year planning a reduction of its African posture and had not planned for this.
The withdrawal was fast. Two Mirage 2000Ds and a tanker left the N’Djamena airbase on 11 December. Faya-Largeau was handed over on 26 December. Abeche followed on 11 January 2025. The Sergent Adji Kossei base in the capital, the last French facility in the country, was returned on 30 January, and the final French soldiers departed by the 31st.
Sixty-four years of presence, sixty-four days of withdrawal. The agreement’s own terms allowed six months’ notice, and the departure ran considerably faster than that, which suggests neither party saw an advantage in a lingering exit.
The Deby government’s stated reason was sovereignty and there is a more specific reading available. France had become a declining bidder. Its regional position had collapsed, its presence was a domestic political liability in a country where anti-French sentiment had become the Sahel’s dominant political current, and other buyers were offering more. There is also a plainer commercial reading: a supplier whose regional franchise has collapsed in three neighbouring countries has weak pricing power, and a vendor notices.
The detail that gives the game away
France’s equipment left Chad aboard a Ukrainian-operated Antonov An-124-100M.
That is a chartered heavy-lift freighter, of Soviet design, operated by a commercial company from a country at war, moving a Western European army’s materiel out of a Central African state that had just terminated its defence treaty.
Every element of this subject is in that sentence. The aircraft is a product of the Soviet transport fleet that dispersed after 1991. The operator is a commercial charter. The customer is a NATO government conducting an entirely lawful and openly reported withdrawal.
The point is not that anything improper occurred. It is that the same small pool of aircraft and operators serves the lawful and the unlawful ends of this market without distinction, because there is no other pool. A state withdrawing from a base and a state arming a militia are both calling the same phone numbers. The gray market and the white market share a fleet, and that shared dependency is why the industry is so difficult to isolate. Ground an operator for trafficking and you may also have grounded the only company willing to fly a relief charter into the same region next month, which is an argument the operators make and which is not entirely self-serving.
The Emirati account
While the French relationship was ending, another was being built, and the timeline is unusually legible because somebody was watching flight data.
On 14 June 2023, two months after the Sudanese war began, Mahamat Deby visited Abu Dhabi and met Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed. Chadian government material recorded five agreements signed, covering energy, geology, and military, security and counter-terrorism cooperation.
An open-source researcher tracking cargo flights identified roughly ten flights to Amdjarass in the month before that visit. In the two to three weeks after it, he identified more than twenty. The first appearances of aircraft on satellite imagery of the airfield match the days following the presidential trip.
The routing is itself informative. Aircraft flew from Abu Dhabi to Amdjarass via Entebbe in Uganda, which is a substantial detour and which breaks a direct origin-destination pair into two legs that look less remarkable in isolation. A flight from Abu Dhabi to Entebbe is unremarkable. A flight from Entebbe to a Chadian airstrip is unremarkable. Only the sequence is informative, and sequences are what flight-tracking archives preserve and paper records do not.
United Nations experts subsequently tracked military cargo flights from Abu Dhabi to Amdjarass between June 2023 and May 2024, and a January 2024 UN report cited credible accusations that the UAE was supplying the Rapid Support Forces through that runway. The UAE denied it. Chad denied complicity.
Amdjarass
The choice of airfield is the part that makes this a Deby story rather than a Chad story.
Amdjarass is the capital of the Ennedi-Est region in the far northeast, close to the Sudanese border. In 2009 it was a small desert settlement. It now has a population in the region of thirty thousand, a military base, and a private airport with a paved runway of about three thousand metres, which is long enough for anything flying and considerably more than a town that size requires.
It is also Idriss Deby’s home region. He was born nearby at Berdoba. He is buried at Amdjarass, next to his father.
So the airfield at the centre of a documented weapons corridor is a strip built to serve the president’s home district, adjacent to the family graves, three thousand metres long, in a town of thirty thousand people in the Sahara. Infrastructure built for prestige and patronage turned out to be infrastructure suitable for something else, which is the recurring accident in this subject: capability created for one reason, available for another.
The geography does the rest. Amdjarass sits near the Darfur border, within practical reach of El Fasher, in the region where the Rapid Support Forces have been fighting. A cargo aircraft landing there is a short overland movement from the destination, across terrain with no border infrastructure worth the name, which is why the airfield matters more than the frontier does. The last leg is a truck, and trucks in that desert are not stopped by anybody.
Why this became visible
The Amdjarass traffic was identified by an independent researcher using commercially available flight tracking and satellite imagery, published on a personal blog, before any official body reported it.
That is worth pausing on. The aircraft transmit position data. Satellite imagery of a remote airfield is purchasable. Correlating a presidential visit with a step change in flight frequency requires a spreadsheet. The tools are a laptop, a subscription, and patience, which is a considerable change from an era when this work required a national technical means budget.
The operational implication is that this is the first era of the ghost-plane economy in which the ghost part has become difficult. An Il-76 landing at a desert strip in 1997 was invisible to anybody not standing on the ramp. The same aircraft doing the same thing in 2023 generates a track, an imagery signature, and a timestamp that a hobbyist can match against a state visit.
What has not changed is the consequence. Detection and enforcement remain different problems, which is the finding the Rhodesian case established half a century earlier. Everybody can see it. Nobody with jurisdiction over every leg of it wants to act.
The constraint the franchise did not price
A franchise has limits, and Chad’s turned out to be domestic and ethnic rather than diplomatic.
The Deby family is Zaghawa. The Zaghawa straddle the Chad-Sudan border, with communities on both sides, and Zaghawa populations in Darfur have been among the groups targeted by RSF violence.
So the arrangement placed a Zaghawa-led government in the position of facilitating the resupply of a force killing Zaghawa civilians a short distance across the border. That generated real domestic resentment within the constituency the regime depends on most.
Combined with Sudanese military threats to strike targets inside Chad and improving Sudanese capacity to interdict, the pressure told. Reporting indicates flights from the UAE to eastern Chad decreased during 2025, with traffic shifting north to Kufra in Libya or directly into Nyala under cover of darkness.
That is the franchise model’s real constraint. External buyers pay in currency and capability. The cost is paid in domestic legitimacy, and when the cost exceeds the payment the service is withdrawn or repriced. Chad did not stop because of sanctions or diplomacy. It stopped, partly, because of who was dying, and because the Zaghawa constituency that keeps the family in power was the constituency being killed. That is a constraint no external buyer can compensate for, because the payment and the cost are in different currencies.
What the Deby franchise costs at home
The franchise has a domestic ledger that rarely appears in the strategic analysis, and it should.
The eighteen-month transition promised in 2021 was extended in October 2022. Protests against the extension were suppressed on 20 October 2022, an event known as Black Thursday, with more than fifty people reported killed. In February 2024, Yaya Dillo, the president’s cousin and the most prominent opposition challenger, was killed on the eve of the presidential campaign, drawing international condemnation. Mahamat Deby was elected in May 2024. Freedom House rates the country Not Free.
There is a relationship between those facts and the four products. A government whose revenue depends on being a reliable partner for external security interests has less need of domestic consent than a government funded by taxation, which is the resource-curse argument applied to security rents rather than to minerals, and its partners have a demonstrated preference for continuity over process. The endorsement at the 2021 funeral communicated exactly that preference, in public, to everyone who needed to understand it. The gap between stated values and revealed preferences is not unique to France and is unusually well documented in this case, because it happened at a state funeral with cameras present.
Oil, and why the franchise exists at all
A reasonable question is why a country with petroleum needs to rent its geography, and the answer explains the whole structure.
Chad began exporting oil in 2003 from the Doba basin through a pipeline to the Cameroonian coast, in a project the World Bank supported on the explicit condition that revenues be channelled into poverty reduction through a supervised management scheme. The arrangement was presented as a model for resource governance in fragile states.
It did not hold. The revenue-management framework was amended and then effectively abandoned, the Bank eventually withdrew from the arrangement, and the proceeds went where proceeds go in a state with a security problem and an army that had put the government in place.
What that left is a country with oil income that is real, volatile, insufficient to fund the state, and pledged forward against loans. Chad has been a persistent debt-restructuring case, with oil-backed borrowing complicating each round.
So the four products are not a strategy adopted in preference to development. They are the revenue available to a landlocked state with a commodity it does not control the price of, surrounded by conflicts, holding a professional army as its single most valuable exportable asset. The resource revenues that fund the other side of this corridor work the same way, and neither is an argument that anybody involved is unusually venal. It is an argument about what a state does when access is the only thing it can sell at a margin.
The claims that do not hold up
An audit, since this arrangement is described dishonestly from several directions.
Chad is a French puppet is contradicted by Chad terminating the relationship unilaterally, on a symbolic date, hours after a ministerial visit.
Chad is a failed state misdescribes a government that has survived rebellions, a dynastic succession, and the loss of its principal patron, while retaining a functioning army and a negotiating position with several great powers.
Chad was simply bought by the UAE oversimplifies a relationship in which Chad has priced, adjusted and partially withdrawn a service in response to domestic conditions.
Mahamat Deby seized power in a coup is contested terminology for an event that suspended a constitution, installed an unelected military council, and was endorsed by the African Union’s principal external partner within days. Reasonable people use different words and the facts are not in dispute.
The corridor is a recent phenomenon is contradicted by four decades of the same geography carrying different cargo for different sponsors, which is the continuity the whole subject rests on.
The French withdrawal was about sovereignty takes a government statement at face value, and the timing, the staging and the subsequent partner search suggest a commercial recalculation.
The UAE flights were humanitarian is the stated explanation and does not fit a pattern that steps up immediately after a military cooperation agreement is signed.
Everything about this is hidden is contradicted by a hobbyist identifying the airlift from public data before any government did.
What the Deby franchise is actually telling us
The final development is the one that completes the argument, and it arrived in 2026.
Chad has been rebuilding military ties with France. The alternative partners did not deliver. Russia’s Africa Corps performed poorly in neighbouring Mali and made Chadian commanders wary. Turkish drones supplied in 2024 proved too expensive for the Chadian air force to sustain. Since the French departure, Chad has lacked reliable medical evacuation and close air support, both of which French aircraft and crews had provided. Discussions have included limited French access to the Adji Kossei base, the last facility handed over in the 2025 withdrawal.
Eighteen months from termination to renegotiation.
What that demonstrates is that the franchise runs in both directions. Chad discovered that its suppliers were not interchangeable, that capability is harder to buy than equipment, and that a partner who provides medevac and air support is providing something a drone purchase does not replace. The vendor learned about switching costs. Equipment can be bought from anybody. Sustainment, training, spares, crews and the willingness to fly a casualty out of a firefight at night are a relationship, and relationships take years that a government under pressure does not have.
Which is the honest shape of this relationship and of most others like it. It is not domination and it is not independence. It is a negotiation between parties with asymmetric power and genuinely mutual need, conducted in the currency of access, renewed and repriced as circumstances change, with the population of the country in question having no part in it. That last clause is the one worth holding, because every product in the Deby franchise is sold over the heads of the people who live on the asset being rented.
Chad sells geography. Geography does not deplete, which means the asset is permanent and the revenue is recurring, which is what makes it a franchise rather than a sale. The buyers change. The corridor is the same corridor the Toyota columns fought over in 1987, and the aircraft landing on it are the same aircraft that have been landing on strips like it since the Soviet Union stopped needing them.
A president is buried at Amdjarass, beside a three-thousand-metre runway in a town of thirty thousand people. Both things are there for the same reason, and neither of them is an accident.