BAGA SOLA: Militants surrounded Ahmat Moussa’s isolated village on Lake Chad’s shores in the dead of night and then attacked – with devastating consequences for the fisherman and many of his neighbors.
Boko Haram militants have sowed terror among those living around Lake Chad for some 15 years, disrupting the fishing, farming and herding on which millions depend.
“I heard the first blasts and I left without looking back,” 42-year-old Moussa said, of the raid on Balangoura nine months ago.
He has a scar where a Kalashnikov’s bullet hit him in the right leg. And while he escaped, his 16-year-old son was abducted in the raid.
Neighbor Baya Ali Moussa also suffered horror and loss that night.
While she also escaped Balangoura, the body of her 23-year-old son was discovered three days later, floating in the lake.
Both villagers found refuge elsewhere on the lake, but they depend on dwindling help from NGOs and aid organizations battling massive foreign cuts to humanitarian budgets.
Surrounded by Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, Lake Chad’s countless islets serve as hideouts for the Islamist militants, whose violent campaign began in Nigeria’s northeast before spilling into its neighbors.
Militant attacks have surged in the wider Sahel region, though Boko Haram has lost ground to the army in the Lake Chad area.
The insurgents have nevertheless remained a constant threat, carrying out frequent kidnappings, executions, rapes and lootings.
In Chad’s Lac province alone, more than 250,000 people have been forced to flee their homes, says the United Nations.
Tipping people further into poverty in one of the world’s most impoverished nations only helps turn the area into a recruiting ground for the militants.
Like 2,000 others, Baya Ali Moussa and Ahmat Moussa have taken refuge in Yakoua, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the Lac region’s capital, Bol, on the banks of a branch of the lake.
“Here we’ve nothing to eat or drink, we survive only thanks to community togetherness and to humanitarian workers,” said Baya Ali Moussa.
For three months, the ACTED humanitarian organization has distributed emergency aid to the displaced people in Yakoua.
“Attacks continue, kidnappings continue, camps for displaced people turn into villages, but the humanitarian momentum we saw from 2015 to 2019 has waned,” said Togoum Atikang, who heads ACTED’s rapid response projects.
“Some donors are pulling out their funding,” he added.
“Wherever we pull out, the population will suffer even more,” he warned.
Chad’s Lac region is one of many around the world to be hit by cuts in the United States’s foreign aid budget ordered by President Donald Trump.
Having accounted for half of the World Food Programme’s funding, the United States was the UN food agency’s top bankroller followed by Europe.
“With funds declining, we have to cut back,” said Alexandre Le Cuziat, WFP deputy director in Chad.
At the beginning of July, the WFP suspended its flight service between the Chadian capital N’Djamena and Bol.
So where previously it took less than an hour to fly in goods and people, now the journey will have to be made by road — a whole day along an unsafe route.
The WFP and the UN refugee agency are also shuttering several offices in the Lac region.
“The US financing freeze has hit some seven percent of the humanitarian aid here in Chad since January,” said Francois Batalingaya, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in the country.
“But the problem is that we have no idea of what the rest of the year will bring.”
He worried that aid groups would leave “from the month of October onwards.”
Funding for the humanitarian response plan for Chad is “only at 11 percent” of the 1.45 billion dollars required, he said.
At the same time last year, it was 34-percent funded, he added.
As the international climate for humanitarian funding has gone cold, at the national level Chad has also prioritized sending emergency aid to its eastern border with war-torn Sudan.
More than a million Sudanese have fled to Chad since the civil war began in April 2023.
“As a result, Lake Chad no longer captures the world’s attention,” Batalingaya said.
“If we forget the people of the region, there will be more people displaced and more people will join these armed groups.”
