“Terrorism is like an epidemic, worse than Ebola, worse than any illness,” Chad’s President Idriss Deby Itno declared on Thursday.
He said this during a visit of solidarity to Burkina Faso days after jihadist gunmen killed 30 people after storming a top hotel in Ouagadougou.
The landlocked central African country of Chad is pivotal in the fight against the Boko Haram Islamists operating in sub-Saharan Africa.
Chad is also a key member of France’s counter-terrorism mission in the Sahel region, known as Operation Barkhane.
Friday’s deadly attack in Ouagadougou “like those we have seen in the Sahel nations do nothing to dent our firm resolve to fight terrorism with all means at our disposal,” Deby said after visiting the scene of the attack, the four-star Hotel Splendid, accompanied by his Burkinabe counterpart Roch Marc Christian Kabore.
“I have come to visit the place which was a place of horror, where 30 people of various nationalities died and dozens more were injured,” he said.
The Splendid Hotel is popular with foreigners and United Nations staff and around half of those killed were foreigners, according to differing tolls given by the Burkinabe government and the public prosecutor.
“These innocents were gunned down by mad men, this is unacceptable,” Deby added.
He also stressed the economic impact of such attacks.
“At the same time you cannot, with the meagre means available to us in this region, combat terrorism while also thinking about development, about youth employment, about creating jobs. It’s impossible,” he said.
Deby announced he was calling for a summit of leaders of the G5 Sahel grouping — Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — on the margins of the larger African Union summit to be held in Addis Ababa on January 31.
“Mali and Chad have already been victims, now it’s Burkina Faso. Practically all the G5 nations have been affected,” he said.
