Some claim he is located at Sebha in the Fezzan, a largely desert region of south-west Libya. He himself prefers to remain discreet about his exact whereabouts, and simply says he is in a difficult predicament and needs to keep on the move in the border territories of Chad, Niger and Libya to avoid being “located”. Located, he says, by the French intelligence services in particular.
The man in question is Mahamat Mahdi Ali, the leader of the rebel group Front for Change and Concord in Chad known by its French acronym FACT, to whom Mediapart has recently spoken twice by satellite phone. It was the armed offensive launched by this opposition group on April 11th that led to the death of the country's veteran leader Idriss Déby Itno, a close ally of France who had ruled the country as president since 1990. The exact circumstances of Déby's death remain unclear; the army says he died on April 20th after being wounded in a battle between the army and FACT soldiers in the north of the country. Déby's son Mahamat Déby has taken over as de facto ruler of Chad as chairman of a transitional military council in N'Djamena.
Far to the north, meanwhile, Mahamat Mahdi Ali, whose forces have suffered heavy losses in recent weeks, is wondering why France has taken against him. “What crime of treason have I committed? Why does France support a dynastic succession?” he asks, referring to the the way Idriss Déby's son has taken power with the tacit support of Paris.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
These are in fact rhetorical questions. Even before he launched his offensive the rebel leader knew full well that France would never abandon its main ally in this region of Africa. Had he harboured any lingering doubts about this, they would have been dispelled three days before he began the attack. Diplomatic sources have confirmed that on April 8th Mahamat Mahdi Ali called the French Embassy in N'Djamena from his base somewhere in southern Libya.
“I explained to them that I couldn't stay in Libya any longer and that I was going to return to Chad,” Mahamat Mahdi Ali told Mediapart. “The person I spoke to replied that any action by FACT would be suppressed. But where are we? On the Champs-Élysées, confronting a demonstration by 'yellow vests' [editor's note, the name give to protestors who demonstrated across France in late 2018 and early 2019]? Or in Chad?” He said that he has not been in contact with French officials since that telephone call.
Throughout the FACT offensive France provided intelligence reports to the Chad authorities as well as logistical aid. The Ministry of Armed Forces in Paris has confirmed this without giving any details. Mahamat Mahdi Ali said that his column of troops was “flown over 24 hours a day, either by drones or by Breguet Atlantics [editor's note, French reconnaissance aircraft]”. He also claims that French Mirage jets had also flown over them, though he says they did not attack the rebel group. These flights, he said, gave a “positive advantage” to the Chad government forces who he said knew “all our details and actions in real time”.
Mahamat Mahdi Ali, a member of the Toubou people of northern Chad, is now 57 and has been engaged in armed struggle since the age of 14 when he fought alongside Hissène Habré, who was president of Chad from 1982 to 1990 before being deposed. The FACT leader today speaks of his disappointment at the stance being adopted by France, a country with which he has strong ties. It was here that he completed his studies at the end of the 1980s, and it is the country which granted him asylum in 1992 after the execution of his uncle under the Déby regime, an uncle who had adopted him as a son after the death of his father. And it was in Reims in northern France that Mahamat Mahdi Ali raised his family of five children. “For a long time I believed that France was the beacon that marked out the road to freedom for the peoples of the world,” he said. “I now no longer believe that.”
Yet this is not the first time that he has been confronted with the realpolitik of French diplomacy and its invisible agents. “Mahamat and France is a story of thwarted love,” said one source who knows the region well and has met the rebel leader in Libya. “To his great dismay the French have never looked on him as a possible solution.”
In 2010 Mahamat Mahdi Ali returned to France, having worked successively for the rebel group the Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad (MDJT), the Chad government in the ministry handling infrastructure, and the major rebel movement in Chad the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD), led by Mahamat Nouri.
At the time he came back to his family in Reims Mahamat Mahdi Ali was secretary general of the UFDD. He says he did not hide this fact. “I always described myself as an opponent of Déby. Agents from the [French] services came to see me to get news,” he said. At the time he was also an active member of the Socialist Party in France.
“He is a real man of the Left, full of intellectual references,” said a diplomat who knows him well. To those who depict him as mercenary, the Chad rebel retorts that he sees himself like “Garibaldi, not Bob Denard”, the latter a well-known French soldier of fortune.
In 2015 Nouri sent Mahamat Mahdi Ali on a mission to Libya, and he later returned there for a second trip. On each occasion he says that the French services were informed of his movements. His task was to restructure the UFDD, parts of which had become scattered across the country. On the ground he met some up and coming younger members of the group who were calling for a change. He returned to France armed with a number of grievances, and he and Nouri subsequently fell out.
At the beginning of 2016 Mahamat Mahdi Ali decided to return to Libya to set up his own movement: FACT. His objective was clear; to topple Déby's regime, by force if necessary. He has not returned to France since and has had no official contact with the country's authorities. Those close to him say he fears being arrested.
Several months after he set up FACT Mahamat Mahdi Ali indeed learnt that he was being targeted by President François Hollande's government, which included some of his former comrades in the Socialist Party. On January 18th 2017 his bank accounts were blocked for six months, under a rolling financial sanction ordered by the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Economy and Finance in Paris. Nouri's accounts suffered a similar fate. The orders were made under France's Monetary and Financial Code which provides for the “freezing of funds and economic resources” that belong to “individuals or organisation or any other entity which commit, try to commit, facilitate or finance acts of terrorism, incite them or take part in them”.
Yet Mahamat Mahdi Ali's movement, based in the Fezzan region of Libya, is allied to the Government of National Unity (GNU) based in Tripoli and which is recognised by the United Nations. On several occasions in 2016 his camps were bombed by aircraft on the orders of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the head of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army and de facto head of the rival Libyan government in the east of the country. At the time France was backing Haftar in Libya.
It is true that the GNU has the backing of some Islamist forces. But so does Haftar. And there was no evidence that Mahamat Mahdi Ali's troops were fighting alongside members of terrorist groups. His own movement is certainly not considered to be such a group, either within Libya or by the United Nations.
Like all armed groups in Libya, FACT is involved in smuggling, an activity which pays for its weapons and vehicles. It has also taken part in several different battles, even if Mahamat Mahdi Ali endlessly insists that his aim is to topple Déby. The first of these was alongside the Third Force militia, linked to the GNU; then from 2017 FACT fought alongside Haftar's ANL, which had gained territory in the Fezzan.
This latter move led to the Libyan justice system targeting FACT in January 2019 in a criminal investigation into kidnapping and banditry. “Rather than mercenaries, the FACT fighters were looked on as auxiliaries by the two major forces operating there,” said Jalel Harchaoui, a senior fellow at the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “FACT has always remained relatively autonomous.”
Mahamat Mahdi Ali has taken the freezing of his assets very badly; it was a tough blow for his family back in France. “We live modestly,” he insists. “Because of this measure my wife and my five children could no longer receive housing benefits or social benefits.” He personally feels “betrayed”. But he told Mediapart: “I have a clear conscience. I support Republican ideas. I have never colluded with jihadists. This measure was aimed at discrediting me.”
Many observers think the financial sanctions were imposed on Mahamat Mahdi Ali to satisfy “friend Déby” who by now had become an indispensable ally in France's war against jihadists in the Sahel region of Africa. At the time France had also granted nationality to the Chad ruler's wife Hinda Déby Itno.
“It's all ridiculous. Mahamat is anti-Islamist, anti-Muslim Brothers. He is very opposed to Islamic State,” said a former diplomat who knows him well. Furthermore, having joined Haftar's side, from 2018 onwards he regularly fought against Libyan elements of Islamic State. “They [editor's note, Islamic State] often attacked us. We had to defend ourselves. That's why we allied ourselves with Haftar,” said a senior member of FACT based in France, who asked to remain anonymous.
A UN report in 2019 confirmed that FACT had been tasked by Haftar's armed forces to “defend the zone against potential attacks, notably from terrorists”. The former diplomat notes: “FACT played an important role against [Islamic State] in the Fezzan. And the French knew that full well, as they had men alongside Haftar at that time.”
Mahamat Mahdi Ali said that he had come across French advisors - “military personnel” - several times on the ground. He even says he gave them information collected after battles, in particular on USB storage devices. Mediapart has not been able to confirm this. However, FACT's role against terrorism cannot be disputed. “[The French authorities] can't have been unaware of our fight against [Islamic State],” said Mahamat.
The freezing of the rebel's assets kept on being extended. Every six months Mahamat Mahdi Ali's wife received a letter from the Ministry of the Interior explaining that, through his activities, he was “facilitating, inciting and participating in the commission of acts of terrorism”. In one of the letters, dated July 27th 2020 and seen by Mediapart, the French authorities claim that in addition to his activities in Libya, he coordinated actions by his followers in France and “showed a desire to overthrow the Chadian government by force”. But it makes no mention of any links with terrorist groups.
By a curious coincidence, just a few weeks before Mahamat Mahdi Ali launched his offensive in April the French government decided to unfreeze his assets in France. The Ministry of the Economy and Finance confirmed to Mediapart that the freezing of the assets had not been continued but declined to explain the reasons for the change. The Ministry of the Interior declined to comment at all.
Conspiracy theorists saw this move as possible proof that Paris had wanted to get rid of Idriss Déby Itno. The reality is very different; the operational support that France gave Chad's army both before and after Déby's death, and its support for the coup d'État that allowed his son Mahamat Idriss Déby to keep the family's grip on power shows that the French government was still relying on the Déby dynasty. In any case, when he started his offensive Mahamat Mahdi Ali was not aware that the French sanctions against him had been lifted. Nor were his family in France; it was Mediapart who told them.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter