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| - Northern Chad is now "completely under control" after rebels entered the region on Sunday, the day of the country's presidential election, the government said. The incursion by "several columns of heavily armed vehicles coming from Libya" happened at around 6 pm on Sunday in the Zouarke area in Tibesti province, around 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) north of the capital N'Djamena, government spokesman Cherif Mahamat Zene said in a statement. But the army dispersed the rebels and "the government now assures the public that the situation is entirely under control," according to the statement released late Monday. The Tibesti mountains near the Libyan frontier frequently see fighting between rebels and the army, and French air strikes were needed to stop an incursion there in early 2019. In February 2008, a rebel assault reached the gates of the presidential palace before being pushed back with French backing. Already on Monday, army spokesman Azem Bermandoa Agouna had said that "steps have been taken to neutralise" the incursion. But the FACT group, mostly made up of Saharan Goran people, said its forces had taken "without resistance" garrisons including Wour and Zouarke, near Chad's borders with Niger and Libya. Based in Libya where it has a non-aggression pact with Khalifa Haftar, the military strongman of the country's east, FACT emerged in 2016 when the UFDD group that led the 2008 offensive split. Its leader Mahamat Mahdi Ali called on Chadians to "keep up pressure on the dictatorship" and "help FACT fighters free the homeland". The incursion came on the same day as 30-year President Idriss Deby Itno was expected to win re-election. Although vote-counting was finished in polling stations on Monday, preliminary results will not be announced until April 25 after a drawn-out compilation process. Initial indications suggested large numbers of people stayed away from the vote, prompting opposition figures to claim their calls for a boycott of the polls had worked. International observers meanwhile expressed satisfaction with the conduct of the election. Concerns over pre-election protest bans and a deadly raid on the home of a would-be candidate had been raised by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. However, neither the AU nor members of the Economic Community of Central African States or the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation charged with monitoring the election cited violence by police against the opposition as a factor on voting day. Togo Prime Minister Komi Selom Klassou, who led the AU delegation, told a news conference Tuesday that pre-election violence pushed three opposition candidates to leave the race "on the grounds that the excessive use of public force against the opposition would compromise the credibility of the vote". But he concluded that their withdrawal "had no impact on the electoral process" and that the vote was carried out in a peaceful and "satisfactory" way. dyg/spm-nrh/gd
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