Ahmat Acyl
Acyl Ahmat Akhabach (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. Volcan Army 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. 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. Commander of the CDR 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. As a reaction Acyl and other insurgent leaders such as Abba Siddick, Adoum Dana and Mohamat Said, threatened to create a counter-government; this cowed Nigeria into organizing a second peace conference in Kano, in April, where all main rebel leaders were present, including Acyl. At the conference Goukouni and Hissène Habré attacked Acyl and other faction leaders, accusing them of having no real military strength on the ground. The participants of the conference were unable to reach any agreement on forming the cabinet, and a few weeks later Habré and Goukouni unilaterally agreed with the N'Djamena Accord to exclude Acyl and his allies from the new Transitional Government of National Unity (GUNT). In their view, Acyl was just "a Libyan provocateur". The increasingly chaotic situation in Chad brought Nigeria to convene in May a third reconciliation conference, this time in Lagos, to which all factions were invited. In response, Acyl and others arrived, but discovered that the factions that formed the GUNT had boycotted the meeting, causing the failure of