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The Toyota War is the name commonly given to the last phase of the Chadian-Libyan conflict, which took place in 1987 in Northern Chad and on the Libyan-Chadian border. It takes its name from the Toyota pickup trucks used as technicals to provide mobility for the Chadian troops as they fought against the Libyans. The 1987 war resulted in a heavy defeat for Libya, which, according to American sources, lost one tenth of its army, with 7,500 troops killed and 1.5 billion dollars' worth of military equipment destroyed or captured. Chadian losses were 1,000 troops killed.
The war began with the Libyan occupation of northern Chad in 1983, when Libya's leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the Chadian President Hissène Habré, militarily supported the attempt by the opposition Transitional Government of National Unity (GUNT) to overthrow Habré. The plan was foiled by the intervention of France that, first with Operation Manta and later with Operation Epervier, limited Libyan expansion to north of the 16th parallel, in the most desertic and sparsely inhabited part of Chad.
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The Battle of N'Djamena began on February 2, 2008 when Chadian rebel forces opposed to Chadian President Idriss Déby entered N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, after a three-day advance through the country. The rebels were initially successful, taking a large part of the city and attacking the heavily defended presidential palace. The palace never fell however, and two days later the governmental troops had pushed the rebels out of the city. The rebels retreated back eastward.
The assault on the capital was part of a longer military campaign to unseat the Chadian president. The array of rebels fighting against the government has shifted during the war, in this battle it was the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development, Union of Forces for Democracy and Development-Fundamental and Rally of Democratic Forces that attacked with some 2,000 men.
Soon after the beginning of the war, government forces repelled a rebel attack on the capital in April 2006 in which hundreds of people are thought to have been killed. The rebels responsible of the attack, the United Front for Democratic Change (FUC) led by Mohammed Nour Abdelkerim, rallied to the government in December; already before it was being replaced as the central force behind the rebellion by the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD), founded in October 2006 and led by Mahamat Nouri.
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The Chadian-Libyan conflict was a state of sporadic warfare events in Chad between 1978 and 1987 between Libyan and Chadian forces. Libya had been involved in Chad's internal affairs prior to 1978 and before Muammar al-Gaddafi's rise to power in Libya in 1969, beginning with the extension of the Chadian Civil War to northern Chad in 1968. The conflict was marked by a series of four separate Libyan interventions in Chad, taking place in 1978, 1979, 1980–1981 and 1983–1987. In all of these occasions Gaddafi had the support of a number of factions participating in the civil war, while Libya's opponents found the support of the French government, which intervened militarily to save the Chadian government in 1978, 1983 and 1986.
The military pattern of the war delineated itself in 1978, with the Libyans providing armour, artillery and air support and their Chadian allies the infantry, that assumed the bulk of the scouting and fighting. This pattern was radically to change in 1986, towards the end of the war, when all Chadian forces united in opposing the Libyan occupation of northern Chad with a degree of unity that had never been seen before in Chad. This deprived the Libyan forces of their habitual infantry, exactly when they found themselves confronting a mobile army, well provided now with anti-tank and anti-air missiles, thus cancelling the Libyan superiority in fire-power. What followed was the Toyota War, in which the Libyan forces were routed and expelled from Chad, putting an end to the conflict.
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The current civil war in Chad began in December 2005. The conflict involved Chadian government forces and several Chadian rebel groups. These include the United Front for Democratic Change, United Forces for Development and Democracy, Gathering of Forces for Change and the National Accord of Chad. The conflict has also involved the Janjaweed, while Sudan allegedly supported the rebels, while Libya mediated the conflict, as well as diplomats from other countries.
The Government of Chad estimated in January 2006 that 614 Chadian citizens had been killed in cross-border raids. On 8 February 2006 the Tripoli Agreement was signed, which stopped the fighting for approximately two months.
However, fighting persisted after that, leading to several new agreement attempts. In 2007, a rift between the main Zaghawa and Tama tribes of Chad emerged. The Zaghawa tribe, to which Chad's President Idriss Déby belongs, accuses the Sudanese government of supporting members of the rival Tama tribe.
The civil war had deep connections to the War in Darfur and the Central African Republic Bush War.
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