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The Chadian army has early took back control of Abeche without renewed fighting, as rebel forces deserted the eastern city they had entered the day before in a new offensive against President Idriss Deby Itno.
“There was no battle, the rebels seemed to take flight,” a Chadian military source told AFP, speaking of the recapture of the main town in eastern Chad.
“The rebels have apparently left the city, we do not know when,” said a spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency in Abeche, Claire Bourgeois Sunday.
The rebel Forces for Development and Democracy (UFDD) had entered Abeche early Saturday amid heavy fighting around the city, a day after launching their second offensive in a month against the Chadian president.
The rebel general Mahamat Nouri, who had claimed Saturday to be inside Abeche, about 700 kilometers (440 miles) east of the capital N'Djamena, could not be reached by satellite phone early Sunday.
Neither side has reported casualties from the Abeche battle, but Bourgeois said between 50 to 60 people — mostly soldiers and rebels but also a few civilians — had been hospitalized.
According to another Chadian military source, the UFDD — a recently formed alliance of several rebel factions — left their positions in Abeche around 4:00 am (0300 GMT) and headed toward the towns of Biltine and Am Zoer, some 60 kilometers away near the border with Sudan.
Another rebel movement opposed to the Deby regime, the Rally of Democratic Forces (RAFD), on Saturday had taken up positions in the two towns.
On Sunday a rebel spokesman denied Chadian army claims that the rebels had left Biltine.
“We still control Biltine and Am Zoer,” said spokesman Yaya Dillo Djerou by satellite phone. “Our troops are moving between the two towns, to provide reinforcements not to abandon them,” he added.
A rebel column of around 80 vehicles rolled into the east of the country from Sudan on Friday and clashes erupted just after dawn on Saturday when the column encountered government forces around Abeche, military officials said.
The Chadian military command in a statement described the Abeche attack as “a new misadventure” for the rebels, whom it branded as “mercenaries paid by Sudan”.
The UFDD had occupied two eastern towns in late October before pulling back toward the borders of Sudan and the Central African Republic. The fighting left heavy losses on both sides.
Sudan has denied Chad's accusations that it has been aiding the rebels, accusing N'Djamena in turn of backing black African rebels in Sudan's war-torn province of Darfur.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's spokesman said Annan condemned “any attempt to seize power by force” in the country, expressing concern that the rebels were reportedly “advancing in the direction of N'djamena”.
The latest rebel offensive in eastern Chad prompted humanitarian groups on Friday to suspend operations set up to deal with the flow of refugees from Darfur and to help victims of violence between Chadian ethnic groups.
The United Nations estimates that more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees, many of them from Darfur, have fled to Chad and that more than 50,000 Chadians have been displaced within their own country.
In addition to the rebel attacks, eastern Chad has seen a wave of ethnic violence, with witnesses reports of Arab horsemen raiding and torching villages whose inhabitants are mostly of black African descent.
The N'Djamena government on November 13 declared a state of emergency across the whole of Chad in an effort to stop these ethnic clashes which it says have left more than 400 people dead and displaced thousands more.
The state of emergency was extended on Thursday until May next year.
