The conflict in Chad, a country little known in the United States, has been raging on and off for many years and has claimed thousands of lives. Yet most Americans would have a hard time finding it on a map.

Chad, formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, is landlocked between Libya to its north, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon to its west, the Central African Republic to its south, and Sudan to its east. After independence from France, which ruled the territory between 1920 and 1960, the country went through a long civil war. Rebels captured the capital Ndjamena in 1979, and since then sporadic fighting has continued year after year. And if this wasn't enough, the recent crisis in the neighboring Darfur region of Sudan is now spilling over into Chad.

Last week a new set of rebels were fighting for control of the capital to unseat the government, itself made of former rebels.

As always in such instances it is the civilian population that suffers the most, and Chad is absolutely no exception to that rule. On Monday, the U.N. World Food Program warned that insecurity in the country could disrupt the flow of vital food assistance to more than 400,000 Sudanese refugees and displaced Chadians, unless the situation was swiftly stabilized.

With the expected arrival of the five-month rainy season in June, relief workers worry that any delay in food deliveries would disrupt plans to pre-position supplies in eastern Chad for refugees and displaced there. Current figures for the country, provided by the WFP, indicate it has 235,000 Sudanese refugees, 150,000 displaced people in the east, and 46,000 refugees from the Central African Republic in southern Chad. At least, those are the ones the WFP feeds.

The humanitarian organization says its January distribution of essential foodstuff was delivered to 235,000 refugees from a total of 12,500 tons of food stocks maintained in Chad. But, new hostilities are sending thousands of Chadians fleeing from Ndjamena over the border into Cameroon. Furthermore, the fighting has forced WPF to pull out international relief staff from the Chadian capital where more than 200 of its agency workers remain.

France intervened in the past; deploying a unit of the military force bivouacked in the former French colony to save the government. But, this time Paris chose to sit it out, letting the course of events unfold. Paris did, however, say it would help the current president, Idriss Déby, flee the country if he chose to do so: a sign of the changing times and of France's change in policy under President Nicolas Sarkozy.