A fresh bout of fighting linked to tensions over access to water between two ethnic communities has killed three people in eastern Chad, a local official told AFP on Tuesday.Monday's clashes come after fighting erupted on Saturday between the Tama and Zaghawa peoples over the use of a well near the border with war-torn Sudan, leaving 42 dead.
"Sadly, three people have died and 10 been wounded in new armed clashes between the two communities," Brahim Issa Galmaye, the state's representative in the border province of Wadi Fira, told AFP.
The latest fighting took place in the same Guereda sub-prefecture as Saturday's clashes, though in a different part of the rural area, Issa Galmaye explained.
Several ministers, senior local officials and the army's chief of general staff were dispatched to the area on Sunday after the Tama-Zaghawa clashes broke out.
President Mahamat Idriss Deby has Zaghawa ancestry through his father, who himself served as the country's leader until his death at the hands of rebels in 2021.
Chad is frequently the scene of violent confrontations between its various ethnic communities, especially in several rural areas where disagreements over land, livestock and water sometimes turn fatal.
Many of these pit sedentary Indigenous farmers against nomadic Arab herders, especially in the desert country's east, across the long and porous border with Sudan.
According to estimates from the International Crisis Group, herder-farmer conflicts killed more than 1,000 Chadians and wounded more than 2,000 between 2021 and 2024.
