Chadian airstrikes on Lake Chad islands feared to have killed 40

Forty people were feared dead after Chadian fighter jets struck islands in Lake Chad, with a fishermen’s leader saying some may have been killed in the blasts and others drowned while trying to escape. The toll remained uncertain as the operation continued across the lake’s marshes and channels, but local accounts pointed to a heavy civilian cost.

Local sources said the strikes targeted Boko Haram positions on islands in the lake, including Tilma Island on the Nigerian side of Lake Chad. The attack was reported to have followed a recent Boko Haram assault on Chadian troops in the Lake Chad border region, underscoring how quickly violence in the basin spills from military targets into nearby fishing settlements and crossing points.

The area has long been a flashpoint. Lake Chad is shared by Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad, and both Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province operate there. Fishing families move through the same waterways used by armed groups, leaving civilians exposed when air power is brought in against insurgent positions. In this latest operation, local sources said the exact death toll could not yet be fixed because the assault was still underway.

The strikes revived memories of October 2024, when Chad’s army was accused of killing dozens of Nigerian fishermen in airstrikes on Tilma Island after a Boko Haram attack that killed at least 40 Chadian soldiers. Chad’s military denied then that it had targeted civilians. That earlier episode, and the fresh reports from Lake Chad, have sharpened concern over the accountability gap in cross-border counterterrorism campaigns, especially where the line between combatant and civilian is blurred by the geography itself.

For fishermen in Kukawa district and other communities around the basin, the danger is compounded by the fact that survival depends on the same islands and waterways now being used as military targets. As Chad responds to insurgent attacks on its troops, the burden of these operations continues to fall on civilians living in one of West Africa’s most volatile frontier zones.