Chad says Sudan arms rebels to block EU peace force

N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - Chad has warned the European Union that delay in deploying peacekeepers on its eastern border with Sudan risked "setting the region ablaze," and it accused its neighbor of arming Chadian rebels to block the EU mission.

Europe hopes to send around 4,000 "Eufor" troops in the coming weeks to protect aid operations in eastern Chad and adjoining northeastern Central African Republic, complementing a much larger U.N.-African Union force planned for Sudan's Darfur.

Chad's government held a crisis meeting late on Wednesday to confront what it said was the threat of attack from its larger Chinese-backed neighbor Sudan, which has resisted efforts to deploy international peacekeepers to war-torn Darfur.

"(This) new aggression on the greatest scale aims to destabilize Chad and block the deployment of Eufor forces in Chad and Central African Republic as well as the formation of a hybrid U.N.-African force in Darfur," government spokesman Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor told state radio after the meeting.

"Any delay in deploying the hybrid forces in Darfur and those of Eufor in Chad and Central African Republic will inevitably result in the region being set ablaze," he said, warning Sudan-backed rebel attacks against Chad were imminent.

Government officials in Khartoum, which accuses Chad in turn of aiding Sudanese rebels, could not be reached for comment.

The conflict in Darfur since 2003 has spilled refugees and violence over the border into eastern Chad, where aid workers are struggling with widespread insecurity as they help more than 400,000 Sudanese and local refugees living in sprawling camps.

The EU force was originally due to deploy in November but has been repeatedly delayed while stretched European armies struggle to assemble equipment needed. A diplomat in Brussels last week called the latest target date of January "ambitious."

Around half the EU force will come from France, which has military units stationed in Chad and Central African Republic under defense accords with these former colonies.

WORST FIGHTING IN MONTHS

Chadian President Idriss Deby, a French-trained former fighter pilot, has warned Chad could slip into civil war, piling pressure on Brussels to deploy its peacekeepers soon.

Deby took personal charge of his front-line forces last month when they said they routed eastern insurgents after rebel factions abandoned an October peace plan, triggering Chad's worst fighting for months.

Both sides said they had killed hundreds of enemy fighters.

Doumgor said Sudan had regrouped and rearmed fighters from the two main rebel factions in preparation for more attacks.

"They are now at the military and civilian airports in el-Geneina, from where they are preparing alongside Sudanese soldiers to launch imminent attacks against Chad," he said.

El-Geneina, capital of Sudan's West Darfur state, is near the Chad border and armed men wearing a hotchpotch of different uniforms frequently tear through its dusty streets in jeeps.

A Reuters witness on a recent visit to Darfur saw Chadian rebels in the remote border region, where Khartoum also says Sudanese rebels have launched attacks from Chadian soil.

Sudanese rebel chief Khalil Ibrahim, leader of Darfur's Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), said Chadian rebels were helping Khartoum's army to defend el-Geneina town.

"The army are unable to defend the town so they have brought Chadian opposition in," Ibrahim told Reuters.

(Additional reporting by Opheera McDoom in Khartoum; writing by Alistair Thomson; Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Mary Gabriel)