FROLINAT (French: Front de libération nationale du Tchad; English: National Liberation Front of Chad) was an insurgent rebel group active in Chad between 1966 and 1993.

The organization was the result of the political union between the leftist Chadian National Union (UNT), led by Ibrahim Abatcha, and the General Union of the Sons of Chad (Union Générale des Fils du Tchad or UGFT), led by Ahmed Hassan Musa. An Islamist, Musa was close to the Muslim Brotherhood. The UGFT remained autonomous within the new group under the banner of the Liberation Front of Chad (FLT). The union and group flag was agreed upon at the Nyala Congress in Sudan between June 19 and June 22, 1966.

Abatcha was proclaimed Secretary-General, while another cadre of the UNT, Abou Bakar Djalabou, was designated to lead the delegation that would represent the movement abroad. A committee was also selected at the congress, composed of thirty members taken equally from the UNT and the FLT. The front was composed exclusively by Muslim northerners, and there was to be no attempt to create a link to the southern expatriates in the Central African Republic.

The movement's official program, also approved at the Nyala congress, proclaimed the rejection of secession, confessional politics, and ethnic discrimination, and stated that neocolonialism should be fought in order to "regain the total national independence of our fatherland". A coalition government, national and democratic, was to be formed, and all political prisoners freed. All foreign troops were to leave, and support was to be given to national liberation movements, and a foreign policy of positive neutrality sought. The economic objectives were quite vague: wages would be raised, arbitrary taxes abolished, and the land given to the tillers. In conclusion, "The document was so vague and so general, it could have been written for any country under the sun."

As the FROLINAT was originally composed of few members, it relied on the fact that the Chadian state was already in disarray; the southern-dominated government despised and bypassed Muslim traditional leaders, and already in 1963, the most important northern politicians had been arrested, and all important positions in the Chadian Armed Forces and in the local governments were held by non-Muslim southerners. To cite Sam Nolutschungu, "Everyone knew that the regime was corrupt, cruel, arbitrary, and absurd."

This discontent already existed in November 1965 after the bloody Mangalmé riots and gave way to a number of loosely-knitted peasant revolts in central and eastern Chad, that rapidly spread from Mangalmé and nearby Batha Prefecture to Ouaddaï and Salamat prefectures, where in February 1967 the prefect and his deputy were killed.

In the BET Prefecture of northern Chad, by 1965 unrest had started expanding. So when Abatcha, with seven North Korean trained companions, penetrated Eastern Chad in November 1966, he could count on a territory that was already in full revolt.

Musa and the most conservative elements of the FLT pulled out of the FROLINAT at the end on 1966, but a dualism was always present between the socialist, anti-imperialist, even Pan-African UNT element and the more conservative and regionalist UGFT tradition. Another element of division consisted in the dualism between the two original areas of the rebellion, Kanem and the East: Kanem mainly attracted support from Chadians who lived in Egypt and the Central African Republic, the east mainly from Sudan.