200 Chadians may have died in an attack near Sudan

In the latest sign that violence roiling Darfur is spilling into neighboring Chad, more than 200 Chadians were feared dead in an attack against two remote farming villages near the Sudanese border, the U.N.’s refugee agency said Tuesday.

A team of humanitarian aid workers that reached the villages of Tiero and Marena on Sunday found mass graves, decomposing bodies, scores of dead livestock and hundreds of torched huts, some still smoldering more than a week after the March 31 attack.

Witnesses said panicked villagers fled without taking time to collect food or valuables. Some victims were chased more than half a mile before being shot. One 8-year-old boy told United Nations officials that bullets dropped “like rainfall,” killing a small girl as she tried to run away.

“The scale is mind-boggling,” said Matthew Conway, Chad spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, who was among those to visit the site. “It was really very disturbing. Complete desolation and destruction. And the stench, my God, the stench.”

The attack was among the deadliest to hit southeastern Chad in the last 18 months, when violence from the Darfur region of western Sudan began spilling over the border.

Officials estimated the death toll at between 200 and 400 people, but the exact figure was uncertain because many victims had already been buried in common graves by the time the humanitarian aid workers arrived.

“We’ll probably never know without digging up the graves,” Ron Redmond, spokesman for the U.N. agency, said in a telephone interview from Geneva. “This was an unusually brutal attack. They just rode into these two towns and shot everything in sight.”

Witnesses said their attackers were a combination of Chadian rebels, who wore military fatigues and drove vehicles, and local militiamen from rival tribes, who attacked on horses and camels.

U.N. officials have been warning for nearly a year that eastern Chad is slipping into the same kind of ethnic and tribal fighting that has engulfed Darfur over the last four years. More than 200,000 people have died in the Darfur conflict and 2 million have been displaced.

The Sudanese government is accused of responding to a 2003 insurgency in Darfur by arming Arab militias, known as janjaweed, to attack and loot hundreds of villages. Officials in the capital, Khartoum, have denied supporting the janjaweed.

As the number of large-scale attacks on villages in Darfur has decreased amid efforts to resolve the bloodshed in Sudan, violence in Chad and the neighboring Central African Republic is rising. Victims in Chad have complained that janjaweed from Sudan have crossed the border and are recruiting local Chadian Arab tribes.

“What is happening in Chad has Darfur as its epicenter,” Redmond said. “We’ve been warning this for months.”

The March 31 attack on the two villages, which are about two miles apart, appeared to be provoked by tribal rivalries and competition for land, officials said. Much of the recent violence in southeastern Chad has pitted one African tribe, known as the Dadjo, against an alliance of other Arab and African tribes in the region.

“The simple analysis of black versus Arab doesn’t quite hold here,” Conway said.

Theft or banditry did not appear to be a factor because there were no reports of stolen livestock and most of the huts and their contents were burned.

In the aftermath of the attacks, more than 9,000 people from surrounding villages have fled the region.

Separately Tuesday, the Chadian government confirmed that its troops clashed Monday with Sudanese forces, killing at least 17 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians.

edmund.sanders@latimes.com