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The War Named For Toyota Trucks
Good marketing or bad advertising?
It is not often that wars are named for consumer products. Usually, the names are simply derived from the combatants, the time period, or the thing that started the war. The Toyota War is named for none of those things. The fighters were not fighting over Toyota they were fighting in Toyotas.
The Toyota War, sometimes also known as the Great Toyota War, was the final battle in a series of wars between Libya and Chad in the 1980s.
The conflict
The African nation of Chad was experiencing a period of turmoil that stretched from the 1960s into the 1980s. Civil war and continued unrest between Chad’s native groups caused a large amount of instability in the region. The instability proved to be a source of anxiety, and opportunity, for Chad’s larger and more prosperous neighbor, Libya.
Libya saw an opportunity to exact a degree of control and influence in northern Chad by exploiting the conflicts for their own gain. Libya intervened on multiple occasions in Chad’s affairs and provided money and weapons to groups that aligned with Libya.
The names of the people in charge of Libya at the time are familiar including Muammar Gaddafi and Khalifa Haftar — one of the current rulers of Libya vying for control of…
