THE FIRST major deployment of Irish troops to the European peace enforcement mission in Chad will take up their positions on the border with Darfur in Sudan this morning after arriving in the capital N'Djamena yesterday.
While the security threat was officially classed as low last night, tensions have flared into serious fighting of late in both Chad and Sudan.
The Irish troops patrolling the border region around their base in Goz Beida in eastern Chad now face the prospect of encountering heavily armed groups backed by both governments as well as rebel and bandit organisations operating in the area.
The Irish are charged with providing security at camps for 400,000 refugees who have fled fighting in Darfur, and at camps for internally displaced persons. They will also conduct long-range patrols of up to one week in a bid to gather intelligence on militia elements and generally shore up security along the border.
Lieut Col Patrick McDaniel, the most senior Irish officer on the ground in Goz Beida, told The Irish Times from N'Djamena that the Irish would not initiate any exchanges with armed elements.
However, if the need arose, the threat would be dealt with.
"We had a situation a few weeks ago where a person from Save the Children was killed north of where we are," he said.
"We've had other reports of thievery and robbery taking place. So there is a threat there, there's no question of that. But we wouldn't have any problem dealing with that.
"Our job is to prevent these people from killing, raping and robbing.
"Everybody is raring to get down [to Goz Beida] to do the job."
The operation and preparatory work for the mission have been the most challenging faced by the Defence Forces.
There is less than 400km of paved roads in Chad, which is twice the size of France. The nearest sea port - in Douala in Cameroon - is 2,400km from the Irish base in Goz Beida, where a camp has been built from a brown field site in recent weeks.
Some 3,750 tonnes of equipment needed for the mission have been shipped from Dublin and transferred across Cameroon and Chad in truck convoys, by rail and by airlift on 17 Antanov 124 aircraft.
The preparatory work in Chad has been conducted by the elite Army Ranger Wing and an advance party of Irish troops, the first elements of which deployed in February.
The planning phase has been conducted against a background of rising tensions.