Chad was named for a mistake. In the eighteen-hundreds, European explorers arrived at the marshy banks of a vast body of freshwater in Central Africa. Because locals referred to the area as chad, the Europeans called the wetland Lake Chad, and drew it on maps. But chad simply meant “lake” in a local dialect. To the lake’s east, there was a swath of sparsely populated territory—home to several African kingdoms and more than a hundred and fifty ethnic groups. It was mostly desert. In the early nineteen-hundreds, France conquered the area, called it Chad, and declared it part of French Equatorial Africa.
A few years later, a French Army captain described Lake Chad, which was dotted with hundreds of islands, as an ecological wonder and its inhabitants as “dreaded islanders, whose daring flotillas spread terror” along the mainland. “Their audacious robberies gave them the reputation of being terrible warriors,” he wrote. After his expeditions, the islanders were largely ignored. “There was never a connection between the people who live in the islands and the rest of Chad,” Dimouya Souapebe, a government official in the Lake Region, told me.
Moussa Mainakinay was born in 1949 on Bougourmi, a dusty sliver in the lake’s southern basin. Throughout his childhood and teen-age years, he never went hungry. The cows were full of milk. The islands were thick with vegetation. The lake was so deep that he couldn’t swim to the bottom, and there were so many fish that he could grab them with his hands. The lake had given Mainakinay and his ancestors everything—they drank from it, bathed in it, fished in it, and wove mats and baskets and huts from its reeds.
In the seventies, Mainakinay noticed that the lake was receding. There had always been dramatic fluctuations in water level between the rainy and the dry seasons, but now it was clear that the mainland was encroaching. Floating masses of reeds and water lilies began to clog the remaining waterways, making it impossible to navigate old trading routes between the islands.
Lake Chad is the principal life source of the Sahel, a semiarid band that spans the width of Africa and separates the Sahara, in the north, from the savanna, in the south. Around a hundred million people live there. For the next two decades, the entire region was stricken with drought and famine. The rivers feeding into Lake Chad dried up, and the islanders noticed a permanent decline in the size and the number of fish.

“Now that I think about it, he might have been holding a seven.”
Then a plague of tsetse flies descended on the islands. They feasted on the cows, transmitting a disease that made them sickly and infertile, and unable to produce milk. For the first time in Mainakinay’s life, the islanders didn’t have enough to eat. The local medicine man couldn’t make butter, which he would heat up and pour into people’s nostrils as a remedy for common ailments. Now, when the islanders were sick or malnourished, he wrote Quranic verses in charcoal on wooden boards, rinsed God’s words into a cup of lake water, and gave them the cloudy mixture to drink. By the end of the nineties, the lake, once the size of New Jersey, had shrunk by roughly ninety-five per cent, and much of the northern basin was lost to the desert. People started dying of hunger.
In 2003, when Mainakinay was fifty-four years old, he became the chief of Bougourmi. He was proud of his position, but not that proud; his grandfather had presided over more than four hundred islands—until the government stripped the Mainakinays of their authority as Chiefs of the Canton, a position that they had held for more than two hundred years. The center of power was moved to the town of Bol, on the mainland. The islanders were of the Boudouma tribe; the mainlanders were Kanembou. They didn’t get along.
Other political developments were more disruptive. Colonial administrators had drawn the boundaries of Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Niger right through tiny circles of huts on the islands. When these nations enforced their borders, the fishermen and cattle herders of Bougourmi, which is in Chad, were cut off from the lake’s biggest market, which is in Baga, on the Nigerian shoreline. In the mid-aughts, hungry and desperate, they turned to foraging in the bush for fruit and nuts. Then they began to run out of fruit and nuts.
“These were our problems before,” Mainakinay told me, in late July, as he sat on the ground inside a reed hut. He wore a white robe over his bony shoulders, and his dark-brown eyes were turning blue at the edges, fading with age. “It was only recently that our real suffering began.”
One night in 2015, Mainakinay saw flames coming from the huts on Médi Kouta, less than a mile away. For the past several years, Boko Haram had sought to establish a caliphate in northeastern Nigeria. Mainakinay had heard of the group on his shortwave radio. Now, after spreading out along the lake, into southern Niger and northern Cameroon, Boko Haram had come to the Chadian islands and begun kidnapping entire villages, replenishing its military ranks and collecting new wives, children, farmers, and fishermen to sustain its campaigns. At dawn, Mainakinay led the people of Bougourmi to a neighboring island to hide. But Boko Haram continued its attacks, and so, for the first time, Mainakinay’s people sought refuge on the mainland, leaving their cattle and belongings behind.

The jihadis encountered little resistance in Lake Chad. Most islands had no more than a couple of hundred inhabitants, and their machetes and fishing tools were no match for Boko Haram’s grenades and assault rifles. When the militants arrived on Médi Kouta, they set fire to the mosque and beheaded a few men; after that, the terrified islanders followed the fighters into wooden boats and paddled west, to Nigeria and Niger. As they moved farther away from the Chadian side of the lake, the captives noticed that some islands were already flying the jihadis’ black flag.
That spring, a few thousand Boudouma fled to the Chadian mainland, near Bol. The United Nations, anticipating military operations in the islands by Chad against Boko Haram, contacted the government. “We met with the minister of defense and the chief of the Army, and urged them to let us know what they’re planning,” Florent Méhaule, the head of the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Chad, told me.
Chad is a weak state with a strong military, known for its brutal treatment of combatants and civilians. In late July, without notifying the U.N., the Chadian Army ordered an evacuation of all islands in the southern basin, warning that anyone who was still there in a week would be considered a member of Boko Haram. Around fifty-five thousand islanders rushed to the mainland. The Boudouma have an extensive history of raiding the Kanembou, and the Chief of the Canton did not allow them into the towns. According to Méhaule, “He just told them, ‘Go stay in the empty land between villages. The humanitarians, in their white vans, will come.’ ”
The evacuation of the southern basin took place just before the harvest, so Boko Haram collected whatever millet, wheat, and maize the islanders had left behind. By the end of November, the Chadian Army had swept through the northern basin, forcibly displacing more than a hundred and ten thousand people in total. They ended up scattered among roughly a hundred and forty spontaneous sites across a vast, inhospitable terrain. “People were everywhere—in places we did not know,” Méhaule said. Because Boko Haram had used boats to attack the islands, the Chadian government banned the use of fishing boats, so the Boudouma had virtually nothing to eat. Without sufficient pasture, many of the Boudoumas’ cattle died.
Méhaule and his colleagues set off in convoys of white Toyota Highlanders, searching for the displacement sites. There were no roads or signs, no paths to follow. “All of our maps were wrong, because they were from the nineteen-seventies,” Méhaule told me. “We were driving through areas that should have been underwater, but we couldn’t even see the lake.”
In recent years, the Lake Chad region has become the setting of the world’s most complex humanitarian disaster, devastated by converging scourges of climate change, violent extremism, food insecurity, population explosion, disease, poverty, weak statehood, and corruption.
The battle against Boko Haram spans the borders of four struggling countries. It is being waged by soldiers who answer to separate chains of command and don’t speak the same languages as one another, or as their enemies, or as the civilians, in the least developed and least educated region on earth.

Across the Sahel, millions of people are displaced, and millions more are unable to find work. The desert is expanding; water is becoming more scarce, and so is arable land. According to the U.N., the region’s population, which has doubled in the past few decades, is expected to double again in the next twenty years.
The Sahel is rife with weapons and insurgencies, and some states are beginning to collapse. In recent years, cattle herders and farmers have started killing one another over access to shrinking pastures—the number of deaths exceeds fifteen thousand, rivalling that inflicted by Boko Haram.
Western countries and the United Nations have been trying to stabilize local governments. Since the early aughts, the U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on strengthening Sahelian security forces, in a bid to limit the spread of jihadism in the region’s vast, ungoverned spaces. But this strategy fails to take into account the complex cruelties of colonialism and the predatory nature of the regimes that have developed in its place. Across the Sahel, many people experience no benefits from statehood, only neglect and violence. “What we are actually doing is making the predator more capable,” a European security official told me. “And that’s just stunningly shortsighted.”
After France took over Chad, it learned that the territory lacked the riches that colonial powers had discovered elsewhere in West and Central Africa. France sent its least experienced and worst-behaved officers there—often as a kind of punishment—and, in the ensuing decades, French military campaigns disrupted trade routes and local economies, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from famine. The French focussed their attention on the forced production of cotton, in a fertile part of southern Chad that they referred to as “le Tchad Utile”—Useful Chad.
In 1958, French Equatorial Africa split up, and two years later Chad became an independent state. The country’s borders had been determined by colonial agreements, and many Chadians couldn’t communicate with one another—there were at least a hundred and twenty indigenous languages. Some Chadians in remote areas were unaware that their villages now belonged to a state.

The country spent the next several decades “suspended between creation and destruction,” as the South African historian Sam Nolutshungu writes, in “Limits of Anarchy: Intervention and State Formation in Chad.” It was “aberrant, marginal, a fictive state,” a country that existed, “even in its peaceful moments, alternately under a cloud of contingent anarchy or tyranny.”
Chad was constantly threatened from the north. Libya’s dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, aimed to form what he called a “Great Islamic State of the Sahel,” and he repeatedly sponsored attempts to topple Chad’s leaders. The French usually supported whichever autocrat or warlord was in power. Chad’s institutions were propped up by French investors and advisers, and hardly extended beyond the capital, N’Djamena. The illusion of Chadian statehood was useful for France and the United States, who saw a strong Chadian Army as a means with which to cripple Qaddafi’s ambitions.
Hissène Habré became President in 1982, in a revolt sponsored by the C.I.A. He had led three violent rebellions and held Europeans hostage, and yet the moment he took the capital he inherited all the international structures of legitimacy afforded to any head of state. Habré ran a vicious security state, with secret detention centers, that tortured and executed tens of thousands of its citizens. But Habré despised Libya’s leader; because of this, the U.S., under Ronald Reagan, supplied him with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons. In 1983, Qaddafi invaded northern Chad, using Soviet tanks. In theory, France and the U.S. were no longer backing a warlord. They were helping a President preserve the territorial integrity of his nation.
Habré’s soldiers fought Qaddafi’s forces in a fleet of Toyota Hiluxes supplied by the C.I.A. In what became known as the Toyota War, the Chadian Army killed thousands of Libyan fighters.

“Don’t worry! I just came to tell you I’m not like other grizzly bears.”
In 1987, as Qaddafi withdrew his troops, Reagan invited Habré to the White House and praised his commitment to “building a better life for the Chadian people.” Then Habré resumed slaughtering ethnic minorities who protested his rule. He also accused three of his highest-ranking officials of plotting a military coup. Two of them were captured and killed. The third, a young colonel named Idriss Déby, fled east to Sudan, and recruited others to join him in a rebellion. Déby also went to Libya, where Qaddafi supplied him with cash and weapons. The next year, Déby’s group drove back across the desert. Habré fled into Cameroon, and Déby became the President of Chad.
It was December 2, 1990. To be Chadian was to be born into a territory where you had a fifteen-per-cent chance of dying before your first birthday. In a country of five million, there were five hospitals, and a few dozen qualified doctors. People routinely died of malaria, cholera, and starvation. The average citizen lived to thirty-nine.
Two days later, Déby gave his first public speech. “I have brought you neither gold nor silver but liberty!” he said. “No more military campaigns. No more prisons.” He claimed that he was “determined to lead Chad, with the participation of all its citizens, to the system of government longed for by all: a system of government based on democracy.” He paused. “I mean, democracy in its fullest sense.” It was a telling slip: a new constitution enshrined freedoms of religion, expression, demonstration, and the press, but, in the years that followed, people who tried to exercise those rights often disappeared.
Chad’s economy was nearly nonexistent. Many Chadians—including former and current rebels, soldiers, and police officers—resorted to highway banditry to survive. After Déby told gendarmes that bandits “should be shot down like a dog,” some officials held public mass executions of suspected criminals, without trials. One day in 1996, gendarmes in N’Djamena arrested an elementary-school student who had stolen food from his neighbors. They put a bag over his head, shot him, and abandoned his body on the banks of the Chari River.
Ten days later, Déby met with representatives from several fledgling Chadian human-rights organizations. He told them that the killings were “in accordance with the wishes of public opinion.” Otherwise, Déby has left his citizens in total neglect. The Irish Times reported that, outside the capital, Chadians were eating boiled leaves and animal feed, and digging up anthills to search for whatever grains the insects had dragged home. “This country is a bit of a police state, but mostly a pirate ship,” the European security official told me. “That’s the sense that I get when I’m here—that I’m on a pirate ship, and the captain is always drunk.”
Déby’s security forces used military planes supplied by the U.S. and France, and maintained by American and French technicians, to transport political prisoners. The French also supplied Déby’s regime with money, trucks, fuel, communications systems, and handcuffs—resources that, according to Amnesty International, had been “diverted from their original purpose to be used for execution and torture.” Although French military advisers stationed at Chadian outposts had witnessed human-rights abuses, they did not intervene, saying that it was not their responsibility to come between the state and its people.
Since Déby took power, his forces have put down numerous rebellions and coups. In 2006, Déby and the President of Sudan sponsored insurrections against each other. The Chadian rebels made it all the way to N’Djamena. French soldiers helped stabilize the capital, but near the Sudanese border the Chadian Army forcibly conscripted children. “Déby has trouble finding soldiers who are willing to fight for him,” a senior Chadian military officer told Human Rights Watch. “Child soldiers are ideal, because they don’t complain, they don’t expect to be paid, and, if you tell them to kill, they kill.”
In 2008, Congress passed a law that banned American military support for governments that used child soldiers. But President Barack Obama secured a waiver for Chad, arguing that it was “in the national interest” of the United States to train and equip Chad’s military. Al Qaeda’s message was taking root in parts of Africa where nation-states had been sloppily crafted and poorly ruled. The war on terror had reached the Sahel.
Around that time, Mohammed Yusuf, a young Salafi preacher in northeastern Nigeria, was delivering sermons about the ruinous legacy of colonialism and the corruption of Nigeria’s élites. After decades of political turbulence and military coups, oil extraction had made Nigeria the richest country in Africa, and yet the percentage of people living in total poverty was growing each year. “The Europeans created the situation in which we find ourselves today,” Yusuf said. It was easy to appeal to the existential grievances of northern Nigeria’s marginalized, unemployed youth. Yusuf told them that the only way forward was to install a caliphate in Nigeria. His followers, who became known as Boko Haram, revived a tradition of jihadism in northern Nigeria that goes back hundreds of years.

In the course of his life, Moussa Mainakinay, the chief of Bougourmi, has witnessed drought, plague, and famine in the islands. “It was only recently that our real suffering began,” he said. In 2015, Boko Haram attacked.Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for The New Yorker
On June 11, 2009, police officers at a checkpoint in Nigeria stopped a group of Boko Haram members on their way to a funeral; in the confrontation that followed, officers opened fire and injured seventeen jihadis. The next month, around sixty Boko Haram members attacked a police station. Gun battles erupted in several towns, and Yusuf was arrested. A few hours later, the police executed him and dumped his body outside the station. A video of the mutilated corpse, still in handcuffs, went viral. Violence exploded all over northern Nigeria: at least seven hundred people were killed in the first week. Yusuf’s deputy, Abubakar Shekau, became the leader of Boko Haram.
Shekau dispatched some of his followers to train with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. When they returned, the group detonated car bombs in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. Propaganda videos show Shekau double-fisting Kalashnikovs and screaming incoherently as he fires bullets into the sky. In 2012, after leading a rampage in the Nigerian city of Kano, he said, “I enjoy killing anyone whom God commands me to kill, the way I enjoy killing chickens and rams.” Shekau’s fighters terrorized remote villages, tossing grenades into huts and burning down mosques. They raped women, slaughtered men, and kidnapped children, whom they forced to carry out suicide bombings. Shekau pledged his group’s allegiance to the Islamic State, but his battlefield tactics were so depraved that isis eventually disowned him. Young men who joined Boko Haram were sent back to their villages to recruit their families. As a teen-age fighter explained to me, “If your family doesn’t come, you have to kill them, because they have chosen to be infidels.”
The Nigerian security forces responded with a series of massacres that drove villagers into the insurgency. One day in 2013, after Boko Haram killed a Nigerian soldier near Baga, on the muddy western shores of Lake Chad, government troops stormed into the town, lit thatched huts on fire, and shot villagers as they tried to escape. Some villagers tried to swim to the islands and drowned in the lake. Roughly two hundred people are thought to have died, and more than two thousand structures were burned.
On January 3, 2015, Boko Haram returned to Baga and attacked a local military base. The soldiers shed their uniforms and fled into the bush, leaving behind weapons, vehicles, and ammunition. During the next four days, Boko Haram slaughtered civilians in Baga and the surrounding villages. “It was impossible to know how many people they killed,” a survivor told me. “I just saw bodies in the streets. Everyone was running.” Thousands of people made for the islands of Lake Chad. Boko Haram followed them.
Many islanders were open to Boko Haram. The Boudouma used Nigerian currency, and for decades those who could afford to had been sending their children to study with Quranic tutors in northern Nigeria. A few years ago, some of those children started calling their siblings and friends, urging them to leave the islands and join Boko Haram. “They told me that if I join them I will go to paradise,” a sixteen-year-old Boudouma told me. “They also said that, at their camp in Nigeria, there are buckets full of money, and you can just take as much as you want. So I followed them.”
Dimouya Souapebe, the government official, said that “it was easy for Boko Haram to come in from Nigeria and poison people’s minds,” by promising access to basic services and Islamic education. “The islanders never had a school. They’ve never had sanitation. They drink the same lake water they defecate in. Out in the islands, there is nothing.”
As a first line of defense on the mainland, the Chadian governor of the Lake Region set up “vigilance committees,” with the help of tribal chiefs. Given Chad’s history of rebellion, the governor was wary of allowing vigilantes to carry weapons, but he distributed cell phones to young men so that they could alert the authorities.
On a Tuesday evening in December, 2015, some months after Moussa Mainakinay and his villagers fled Bougourmi, a contact living on a jihadi-controlled island warned him that Boko Haram was planning to attack the market in Bol, the biggest town on the Chadian side of the lake. That night, Mainakinay and a group of vigilantes stood guard, looking for boats. Eventually, they spotted a canoe moving toward them, containing several men and women. When it reached the shore, a few of the passengers detonated suicide vests, killing most of the others. Flesh and cloth rained down. A teen-age girl collapsed screaming; the explosion had mangled her legs.

The vigilantes took her to the hospital in Bol, a small concrete building with rudimentary supplies. Someone roused Sam Koulmini, one of only two doctors in Bol. (The other is his wife.) “Boko Haram told the girl that the explosives wouldn’t hurt her—that, if she killed some people in the market, they’d give her money when she got back,” Koulmini told me. That night, he amputated her right leg and one of her damaged fingers.
For the next several days, she was kept in an isolated room, guarded by gendarmes. During her time with Boko Haram, she had become addicted to tramadol, an opioid painkiller that is widely abused in the region. “A macro-dose of tramadol makes you feel as if you’re in the clouds,” Koulmini explained. “You’re afraid of nothing. Pretty much all the young people are taking it.” The injured girl showed severe symptoms of withdrawal; held in isolation, he says, “she became psychotic.” On the second day, she started smearing feces all over her body.
The gendarmes wouldn’t let Koulmini visit his patient more than once a day, and they rushed him as he changed the dressings on her wounds. By the time he noticed that there were still pieces of shrapnel inside her left leg, it was too late; the limb was gangrenous. He had to cut that leg off, too.

Because Boko Haram had used boats to attack the islands, the Chadian government banned the use of boats. Boudouma fishermen were left with virtually no way to feed their families.Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for The New Yorker
Before Boko Haram invaded the islands, humanitarian groups in Chad were preoccupied elsewhere, dealing with nationwide health and malnutrition crises, and with refugee crises near Chad’s borders with Sudan and the Central African Republic. “We all had to open very quickly,” Méhaule, of the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told me. But the Lake Region was so poor and undeveloped that it was hard to distinguish the needs of the displaced islanders from those of mainland villagers. “Some of the displaced, for example, own a huge quantity of cattle,” he said. In the short term, they may be better off than people who have shelter but no food.
In late July, I flew from N’Djamena on an aging propeller plane that, twice a week, takes humanitarians and supplies to Bol. From the sky, I could see black smudges, clustered circles in the sand—remnants of burned-out villages. The movement of people and cows had left faint tracks across the islands and through the reeds and lily pads that filled the waterways between them.
For the next week, I travelled through the Lake Region with two unicef employees and