It borders Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west.

During the 7th millennium BC, the northern half of Chad was part of a broad expanse of land, stretching from the Indus River in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, in which ecological conditions favored early human settlement.

[2] In the prehistoric period, Chad was much wetter than it is today, as evidenced by large game animals depicted in rock paintings in the Tibesti and Borkou regions.

Although many states rose and fell, the most important and durable of the empires were Kanem–Bornu, Baguirmi, and Ouaddai, according to most written sources (mainly court chronicles and writings of Arab traders and travelers).

Finally, around 1396 the Bulala invaders forced Mai Umar Idrismi to abandon Njimi and move the Kanembu people to Bornu on the western edge of Lake Chad.

[4] The Kingdom of Baguirmi, located southeast of Kanem-Bornu, was founded in the late 15th or early 16th century, and adopted Islam in the reign of Abdullah IV (1568–1598).

[6] Two fundamental themes dominated Chad's colonial experience with the French: an absence of policies designed to unify the territory and an exceptionally slow pace of modernization.

Under the administration of Félix Éboué, France's first black colonial governor, a military column, commanded by Colonel Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, and including two battalions of Sara troops, moved north from N'Djamena (then Fort Lamy) to engage Axis forces in Libya, where, in partnership with the British Army's Long Range Desert Group, they captured Kufra.

The more conservative Chadian Democratic Union (UDT) was founded in November 1947 and represented French commercial interests and a bloc of traditional leaders composed primarily of Muslim and Ouaddaïan nobility.

The PPT won the May 1957 pre-independence elections thanks to a greatly expanded franchise, and Lisette led the government of the Territorial Assembly until he lost a confidence vote on February 11, 1959.

The year after saw the birth in Sudan of the National Liberation Front of Chad (FROLINAT), created to militarily oust Tombalbaye and the Southern dominance.

Proving more fortunate was his choice to break with the French and seek friendly ties with Libyan Brotherly Leader Gaddafi, taking away the rebels' principal source of supplies.

But while he had reported some success against the rebels, Tombalbaye started behaving more and more irrationally and brutally, continuously eroding his consensus among the southern elites, which dominated all key positions in the army, the civil service and the ruling party.

Malloum proved himself unable to cope with the FROLINAT and at the end decided his only chance was in coopting some of the rebels: in 1978 he allied himself with the insurgent leader Hissène Habré, who entered the government as prime minister.

Internal dissent within the government led Prime Minister Habré to send his forces against Malloum's national army in the capital in February 1979.

Malloum was ousted from the presidency, but the resulting civil war among the 11 emergent factions was so widespread that it rendered the central government largely irrelevant.

A series of four international conferences held first under Nigerian and then Organization of African Unity (OAU) sponsorship attempted to bring the Chadian factions together.

الاتحاد، العمل، التقدم ( Arab ) Libya's partial withdrawal to the Aozou Strip in northern Chad cleared the way for Habré's forces to enter N’Djamena in June.

Earlier French demands for the country to hold a National Conference resulted in the gathering of 750 delegates representing political parties (which were legalized in 1992), the government, trade unions and the army to discuss the creation of a pluralist democratic regime.

By mid-1997 the government signed peace deals with FARF and the MDD leadership and succeeded in cutting off the groups from their rear bases in the Central African Republic and Cameroon.

No active armed opposition has emerged in other parts of Chad, although Kette Moise, following senior postings at the Ministry of Interior, mounted a smallscale local operation near Moundou which was quickly and violently suppressed by government forces in late 2000.

Déby, in the mid-1990s, gradually restored basic functions of government and entered into agreements with the World Bank and IMF to carry out substantial economic reforms.

The project established unique mechanisms for World Bank, private sector, government, and civil society collaboration to guarantee that future oil revenues benefit local populations and result in poverty alleviation.

This plan ensured transparency in payments, as well as that 80% of money from oil exports would be spent on five priority development sectors, two most important of these being: education and healthcare.

The President on national radio stated that the situation was under control, but residents, diplomats and journalists reportedly heard shots of weapons fire.

The Chadian government denied a warning issued by the French Embassy in N'Djamena that a group of rebels was making its way through the Batha Prefecture in central Chad.

[17] Nearly 100 children at the center of an international scandal that left them stranded at an orphanage in remote eastern Chad returned home after nearly five months March 14, 2008.

The 97 children were taken from their homes in October 2007 by a then-obscure French charity, Zoé's Ark, which claimed they were orphans from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.

[18] On Friday, February 1, 2008, rebels, an opposition alliance of leaders Mahamat Nouri, a former defense minister, and Timane Erdimi, a nephew of Idriss Déby who was his chief of staff, attacked the Chadian capital of Ndjamena – even surrounding the Presidential Palace.

In August 2018, rebel fighters of the Military Command Council for the Salvation of the Republic (CCMSR) attacked government forces in northern Chad.