Our proxies are freedom fighters...

There is something almost tragic about the presumption of Chadian (interim) Defense Minister Adoum Younousmi in his announcement that Chad has ended its raids into Sudan. Those would be the air raids into and ground operations along border with Sudan over the last week. We'll have to see if Sudan goes along with the whole "stopping" thing. Anyway...

He had to go and say the "M" word.

"We destroyed seven pockets of groupings of mercenaries. We hit them with our aircraft along the border, without any collateral damage," Younousmi said in a statement, using the term mercenary to describe the eastern Chadian rebels.

...

"Chad will no longer accept groups of mercenaries reorganising and rearming to attack it, wherever they are. However far it takes us, we will go by land, air and sea to destroy the mercenary bases," he said.

The report says they captured roughly a hundred of them; I'm sure we are all looking forward to seeing the parade. Now knock off with the exculpatory language. The insurgents are Chadian and Sudanese tribals, and they are all backed by either Sudan or Chad for the express purpose of destabilizing the opposite government. Their wanting to pull al-Bashir and company down makes the Chad-backed groups the popular favorite world-wide, but from a more measured view, there just isn't very much difference between "their" insurgents and "your" insurgents.

On that bit about "by Sea", never mind the fact that Chad is a landlocked nation. He probably just meant that the glorious libertarian freedom-loving patriots that make up Chad's allies in opposition to the al-Bashir regime in Sudan will cross the entirety of Sudan for the chance to engage in Naval Expeditionary Warfare on the Red Sea.

Either that, or Chad is working on a *really* long canal.

Or maybe, just maybe, he was demonstrating that...

T.I.A.