For one, the war appeared to be a continuation of the conflicts of Darfur and Chad, which include the competition for power and land. Secondly, there was an internal Chadian conflict. Déby reverted to a one-man military rule after a hopeful broadening of the base of his regime in the late 1990s which was coupled by the growth of civil politics in N'djamena. Déby relied heavily on a close-knit group of kinsmen and on claiming the allotted government finances for his own agenda, distributing aid in return for civilian loyalty. Third is Khartoum's (capital of Sudan) strategy for managing security within its border, which include treating the weak surrounding states as merely extensions of its internal limits. The Sudan security helped bring Déby to power in 1990 as part of their responsibility that also saw it engage militarily in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Central African Republic (CAR) over the military decade. In the same way that Khartoum used a combination of extortion and retribution to control its provincial elites in Darfur, it used the same tools to influence its trans-border limits. Furthermore, the regional competition for dominance through an immense area of central Africa has rarely been governed by state authority. This isolated area includes Chad, CAR, and northern DRC, as well as the areas of Tripoli and Sudan, with Kinshasa, Kigali, Kampala, and even Asmara are competing for influence across this area, as well as Khartoum.