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LONDON — President Donald Trump’s decision to include Chad in the latest travel ban has baffled experts who are wondering why the African nation was chosen over others in the region.
The new presidential order renews restrictions on five of the six countries previously targeted — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen — and adds North Korea, Venezuela and Chad. Sudan has dropped off the list.
“It’s a head-scratcher and also strange for diplomatic reasons,” Michael Shurkin, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, said. “In terms of security, Chad is actually relatively capable.”
Out of all the countries in the Sahel, as that area of Africa is known, Chad has a reasonably close partnership with the U.S.
It has cooperated extensively in the fight against terror, and specifically against the African terror group Boko Haram. This summer, Chad hosted for the third time a 20-nation military exercise, organized by the U.S. African Command, aimed at strengthening local security forces. And the U.S. recently opened a new $300 million embassy in the capital, N’Djamena.
Trump’s proclamation said that “Chad does not adequately share public-safety and terrorism-related information and fails to satisfy at least one key risk criterion.”
It also mentioned the presence of several terrorist groups in the region, including elements of Boko Haram, ISIS-West Africa, and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
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