Ahmat Acyl

Taking advantage of the Libyans' departure, Habré in 1982 attacked the GUNT, advancing across central Chad from his bases in Darfur, and occupied N'Djamena with hardly any opposition on June 7, forcing the GUNT to flee. A month later, on July 19, Acyl died in the southwestern town of Laï when he inadvertently stepped backwards into the spinning propellers of his Cessna airplane, a gift from Gaddafi. He was buried in Moundou, in front of the lycée Adoum Dallah.

This was followed on January 6, 1981, by a joint communiqué issued by Goukouni and Gaddafi, that stated that Chad and Libya had agreed to "work for the realization of complete unity between the two countries". The comuniqué, while strongly supported by Acyl and his faction, had a negative international response, and was also unpopular in Chad; Goukouni was now seen as a Libyan puppet. Relations between Goukouni and Gaddafi became strained, possibly because of rumors that Gaddafi was instigating a coup d'état against Goukouni, to replace him with Acyl. Goukouni's suspicions of plans to replace him with Acyl had been fueled previously by the assassination by Libyans of two senior FROLINAT officials, and the clashes between the First Army and Acyl's CDR.

On March 20, 1980,Defense Minister Habré with Egyptian and Sudanese support rallied his militia, the Armed Forces of the North, in an attempt to overthrow Goukouni, leading to the second battle of N'Djamena, which pitched Habré's men against factions led by Goukouni, Acyl and the vice-president, Wadel Abdelkader Kamougué. To defeat his rival Goukouni, probably persuaded by Acyl, on June 15 signed a defense pact with Libya; as a result 7,000 Libyan troops and 7,000 members of the Libyan-raised Islamic Legion were in Chad by the end of 1980, and helped expel Habré from N'Djamena on December 16, after a week of harsh fighting.

Acyl's faction, renamed Democratic Revolutionary Council (CDR) at the beginning of 1979, did not participate in the battle of N'Djamena that erupted in February 1979 and caused the fall of the government in Chad. For this he was overlooked at the first international peace conference held in March in Kano, in Nigeria, where the main militias agreed to create a government of national unity, which excluded all pro-Libyan factions.

Acyl rapidly strengthened his militia, which became famous for the quality of its fighters and garnered increasing support among the Baggara element in the country. Libya's support was also important to Acyl's group, which from 1978 became bigger and steadier than the other insurgent factions. In the same year Acyl supported Libya's goal to reunite the FROLINAT's main factions, that resulted in the congress of Faya in which Goukouni Oueddei, leader of the People's Armed Forces (FAP), became the new secretary-general of the FROLINAT. The accord didn't last long. Gaddafi instigated Acyl to attack Oueddei's FAP in Faya on August 27, 1978 in an attempt to wrest control of FROLINAT from him, but Acyl was defeated. Acyl, at the time the FROLINAT's adjutant chief of staff in charge of the direction and administration of the military, promptly left Faya for Tripoli under the protection of Libyan troops.

Under the Tombalbaye government, Acyl had been a National Assembly deputy from Batha. In 1976 he joined the small Arab-dominated Volcan Army. With the support of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's president, he opposed the group's leader, Mohamed Baghlani, and when the latter died in a traffic accident in Tripoli in 1977, promptly became the new leader of the militia. From that moment, he was known as Gaddafi's man in Chad.

Ahmat Acyl (1944–1982) was a Chadian Arab militia leader during the Chadian Civil War. He was the head of the Democratic Revolutionary Council until his death in 1982, and served as the foreign minister in Goukouni Oueddei's government.