Chad is in flames again, with rebels opposed to President Idriss Deby racing across its eastern borderlands to attack towns and isolated military garrisons with pick-up trucks bristling with mounted machine-guns and anti-aircraft cannon.
 
A thinly-stretched European Union military force (EUFOR) is deployed in eastern Chad with a U.N. mandate to protect nearly half a million Sudanese and Chadian civilian refugees who have fled violence in Darfur and in Chadian territory.
 
Yet despite the European military presence, the rebel attacks have continued and the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has been forced to suspend its activities at its 12 camps in eastern Chad.
 
A furious President Deby, who had asked for the international community to send a protection force into violent eastern Chad, has accused EUFOR of “closing its eyes” to the killing of civilians by the rebels and of allowing them to steal vehicles, fuel and food.
 
Do you think EUFOR is doing its job in eastern Chad? Should it be engaging the advancing rebels or staying neutral and out of Chad’s domestic conflict?
 
Some say the the conflict in Darfur and Chad is a “proxy war” between the rulers in Khartoum and N’Djamena, fought by rebel groups on the ground. What do you think?
 
When the rebels last attacked the capital N’Djamena in February and besieged Deby in his palace, former colonial power France threw its political and military weight behind Deby to save him. Now French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner is saying France will not intervene militarily in Chad.
 
Should France be intervening in Africa to prop up chosen favoured rulers as it did in the past under the old “Francafrique” system? Do you believe French President Nicolas Sarkozy when he says that “Francafrique” is dead? Or do you think the French military still holds sway in countries like Chad and Central African Republic?

By reaching the gates of Khartoum, Darfur rebels have dealt one of the heaviest blows to Sudan’s traditionally Arab ruling elite since independence in 1956.

Early on Sunday, it looked as though government assertions that the army had beaten back the initial assault were true, but what is the attack going to mean for Africa’s biggest country and the way it is run?

The peace deal with south Sudanese rebels in 2005 made clear Khartoum could no longer afford to rule by force over a mostly black African region where Christians and animists predominate.

Now rebels from Muslim, but largely non-Arab, Darfur have shown the ability of groups who feel neglected in the rest of Sudan to take the battle to Khartoum.
Will there be retaliation in Darfur? Sudan has oil money to buy weapons, but if the war could be won militarily then why has that not happened already?

Will it be a fight to the death between leaders in Sudan and Chad, who accuse each other - by many accounts fairly — of backing each other’s rebels? Or will they have to find a real accommodation?

Could the rebel assault in the longer term push Sudan and the fractious Darfur rebel factions into real peace talks?

And if that happened, would it lead to a more durable Sudan or towards the breakup of a state whose borders were drawn by British imperialists?

What do you think?