Two French soldiers wounded in a shootout by Chadian troops in N’Djamena

Two French soldiers were shot and wounded Tuesday near the Chadian presidential palace in the capital N’Djamena, in what the French military described as an “accident.”

The two soldiers were on a reconnaissance patrol outside the palace to prepare for an official visit, Colonel Frederic Barbry, a military spokesman, told AFP. “The circumstances of the accident are still to be determined,” he said, adding the two soldiers’ lives were not in danger but they were being evacuated.

An officer in Chad’s presidential guard, who asked not to be named, told AFP the two “arrived in a white Prado (jeep). They were in civilian clothes and stopped in front of the main gate of the new palace and therefore the soldiers on guard fired on them. Then another car came and got them.”

Chad, whose president Idriss Deby has been in power for three decades, is an ally of France and its military is seen as one of the most effective in the region. Its military is a key part of the 5,000-man G5 Sahel force, alongside Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Mauritania, cooperating with France’s Barkhane force deployed in the Sahel to combat a growing Islamist insurgency.

Deby surprised G5 partners and France earlier this year when he said no Chadian soldier would participate in operations outside the nation’s border. The Chad military also participates in the Multinational Joint Force (FMM) which since 2015 has been fighting Boko Haram, now very established in the Lake Chad basin on the border with Niger and Cameroon.

Boko Haram’s jihadist conflict in northeast Nigeria since 2009 has killed 35,000 people and displaced around two million from their homes. On March 23, 98 Chadian soldiers were massacred in an attack on their base at Bohoma on the banks of Lake Chad.

Deby then ordered a massive offensive against the group from March 31 to April 3, and said there was “not a single jihadist left” in the Lake Chad region. N’Djamena claimed a thousand “terrorists” had been killed in the crackdown.