N'DJAMENA, March 19, 2026 (BSS/AFP) - A drone from war-torn Sudan killed 17 
people when it bombed the border town of Tine in eastern Chad, the Chadian 
government said Thursday, raising an earlier toll.

The incident late Wednesday was the latest spillover into Chad from the 
conflict in Sudan, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have 
been fighting the Sudanese army since April 2023.

The paramilitaries have conducted several operations near the Chad border, 
leading to deaths on the Chadian side.

Chad shut the border on February 23 in a move it said was aimed at preventing 
"any risk of the conflict spreading".

"Despite various firm warnings addressed to the different belligerents in the 
Sudan conflict and the closure of the border... the town of Tine... has again 
been the target of a drone attack," a spokesman for the Chadian government 
said Thursday in a statement.

"This latest assault of extreme gravity has caused the death of 17 of our 
compatriots and left several others injured," it added.

Late Wednesday, a military source told AFP a drone attack from Sudan 
attributed to the RSF had killed 16 people in Tine.

The RSF denied involvement in a post on Telegram, blaming Sudan's army, its 
rival in the three-year civil war.

Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby called a meeting of the defence and 
security council during the night.

He ordered the army to "retaliate starting from tonight to any attack coming 
from Sudan", according to a presidency statement on social media.

A rocket launched from Sudan caused damage at the end of February in Tine, 
where 15 soldiers and eight civilians had already been killed as a result of 
the conflict since late December, according to an AFP tally.

Darfur, a vast region in western Sudan bordering Chad, has been almost 
entirely controlled by RSF paramilitaries since they captured the city of El-
Fasher in October.

On February 21, they claimed control of the border town of Tina, the twin of 
Tine in Chad, from which it is separated only by the narrow bed of a 
watercourse that is dry most of the time.

Nearly 1,400 kilometres (870 miles) long and located in a desert region, the 
border between Chad and Sudan remains porous and difficult to control.

The civil war in Sudan has killed several tens of thousands of people and 
displaced more than 12 million, nearly one million of them to Chad, according 
to the UN.