Abdelkerim Brahim relives the day more than a decade ago when his father was killed in cold blood. The men had been praying when the shooting started. Bullets crackled from all directions, leaving the rangers, who just moments before had been bent towards Mecca, no time to react. Five men lay dead, Brahim’s father among them.
The ivory poachers, bristling with AK-47s, had most likely crossed from Sudan into Chad. From there they would have ridden on horseback through the Sahelian sands for some 300 kilometres. Their target was Zakouma, a national park roughly the size of Cornwall, where Brahim’s father was on patrol. He had been in an area outside the park, where the elephants migrate in the wet season.
“I heard they were Janjaweed,” said Brahim, using a name that means “evil on horseback”. That’s what people called the Arab militia who thundered into villages in Darfur, west Sudan, looting, raping and killing. Now they had come for the last elephants in Chad.