The battle of the French occupation forces and the forces of Fatih Rabah on April 22 of 1900 marked the demise of the era of kingdoms in Chad, and the birth of the current statehood of Chad, situated in the region between the Arab Muslim world and Equatorial Africa. Today, Chad ranks 184 out of 187 countries on the Sustainable Development Index.
RELIGIOUS CONFLICT
Islam has spread across this region since 1090, with the King of Kanem, “Dunama Dabbalemi” converting to Islam, while Christianity did not begin to spread until 1920, when the American Evangelical Baptist missionaries grew more active and were bold in preaching, leading up to heated competition between the followers of the two monotheistic religions, which was manifested in distorted images, showcased by rigid collective consciousness of the Christian minority dominant in the West, North and East, while Muslims had control over the South, which is dominated by mosques, and where it is difficult to build churches. This fervent competition often led to bloody armed clashes, clearly showcased in the jihad of Sheikh Ismail Ahmed Bishara in June of 2008 in Baghirmi. Islam has suffered polarization as a result of the religious competition between the main Sufi and Salafi doctrines, and this was evident in the discourse, principles and symbols of these trends.
ECONOMY AND WEAPONS
Economic instability on the borders of Chad, especially on the northern eastern and western parts in the Lake Chad region, which is made up of an archipelago of more than four hundred islands, the deterioration of infrastructure, and the notoriously poor basic social services, push youth into illegal economic work and adopt extremist ideology; they are young people who have strong ties with each other and feed each other with deviant ideas, especially in remote border areas. Instead of borders being a dividing line between states, border regions have become a zone of cultural and social interaction, making the ethnic groups settling in those regions a tool for perverted beliefs, such as the takfiri approach advocated by Boko Haram.
The uncontrolled circulation and availability of small and light weapons - due to the political deterioration of the country and across some countries in the immediate vicinity - is a catalyst for violence in all manifestations. The resurgence of destructive ethnic and sectarian conflicts in recent years shows the impact of arms circulation on the formation of social values, and the country’s political, religious and economic reality, in addition to the factors that generate extremism and drive violence, slavery and tyranny across the country. This also includes the phenomenon of asylum and the large increase in the number of refugees, with the exacerbation of the crises of the countries of the region. This negatively affects areas with good economic resources, increasing poverty of underprivileged areas with resources, making them forced to rely on humanitarian aid, such as the governorates in the southern region, where the population suffers from unprecedented grinding destitution and penury, and criminal acts and a high propensity to accept extremist rhetoric. The Lake Chad border area, close to the Boko Haram hotbed, is a clear proof of the complexity of this reality, as the region has become the scene of various types of organized terrorist action.
EDUCATION AND EXTREMISM
According to statistics, the illiteracy rate has reached 96% for men and 97% for women, in addition to nearly one million young people who are not enrolled in school, and they are of school age. This is a tragic example of refusing to enroll in schools in the regions of Barah Al-Ghazal and Kanem. There are various attempts to provide a logical explanation for this deteriorating reality in education, which makes education per se an important criterion for the issue of security, in such a way that strengthens the positions of defenders of security analyses in the context of examining educational issues, as the uneducated or low-education youth is an easy prey or victim for monsters of perverted ideologies and imposters.
Looking into the standard of education and its impact on the security reality makes it imperative to monitor the reality of informal education in the learning circles, with its outputs inappropriate for the labor market, and its reliance on teachers who do not have the specialized, educational and methodological skills that meet the requirements of the stage. Some educational centers and schools turn into a focus of differences and controversies in the faith, and bloody battles often arise from this, which forced the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, which is the representative body of Islam in Chad, to close some schools and places of worship to eliminate the causes of disagreement that affect the conflict and polarization that lead to more extremism and violence among the followers of different ideological and doctrinal approaches.
COUNTER-EXTREMISM APPROACH
The poor awareness among the public of the importance of implementing some of the measures taken by the state in the context of counterterrorism, especially the physical frisk search and the closure of streets during Friday services, raises major problems in the mosques located in the southern provinces of the capital, as well as in the southern region of the country, where there are many quarrels and clashes between citizens and members of the Mosques Vigilance Committee. In rural areas, self-defense groups in support of the armed forces (logistically) and informally contribute to the deterioration of relations between the components of society, due to the many and systematic violations of human rights in their practices.
Extremism in Chad not only arose from what the country witnessed throughout its long and bloody history of acts of violence criminalized and forbidden by religion, but also contributed to their emergence and strengthened their spread of instability in the various political, economic, social and cultural fields, and interactions between the internal societal components and the external vital factors influencing the events, and fueling conflicts to achieve their goals according to their own beliefs. Most of the aforementioned factors that influence the emergence of extremism in Chad are part of the quantitative interpretation that depends on numbers, sizes, and means. The literature on violent extremism and multi-fold fundamentalism in Chad gives precedence to this number-based approach.
Statistics cannot single-handedly show and clarify the reality of the issue of extremism, which changes in form, content and motives, and is getting more and more complex day by day, depending on the different contexts, in a country still struggling in a post-conflict situation, as is the case of Chad. It is worth noting the need to highlight the path of individuals in the context of studies monitoring extremism, especially with regard to their past, emotions, frustrations, feelings of anger and shame, and their interaction with society within the framework of the qualitative approach, producing useful recommendations to better understand extremism, working out appropriate counter-extremism solutions.