Liberian Forces, Rebels Fight Over Bridge

Government forces pushed rebels back across a key bridge in Liberia’s capital late Wednesday, breaking insurgents’ brief hold on the crossing amid heavy fighting that shattered a day-old cease-fire pledge and sent thousands of families fleeing in a city short of food, water and shelter.

Control of the bridge had put insurgents in position to strike at the road to the country’s main airport – and to encircle downtown, last stronghold of President Charles Taylor’s government. Late Wednesday, neither side held the bridge. Government and rebel forces fired at each other from opposite ends of the span.

Separately, West African foreign ministers meeting in Dakar, Senegal, promised to deploy two Nigerian battalions to Liberia within days – vanguard of what ministers said should be a 3,250-strong international force to bring peace to the devastated nation.

Taylor will leave Liberia the same day the battalions arrive, top aide Lewis Brown said in Ghana, where he is leading the government delegation during peace talks. Taylor, who is wanted on war crimes charges, has repeatedly promised to step down, but insists peacekeepers deploy first, raising skepticism among his opponents that he will go.

Meanwhile, three helicopters whirled into the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Monrovia, bringing the rest of a 41-member Marine team to protect the facility. The helicopters ferried out 23 aid workers and journalists, mostly Americans.

Half the Marine team flew in Monday just as a heavy barrage of mortars began striking the city, with shells hitting a building in the embassy compound and a compound across the street where thousands of Liberians had taken shelter, killing 25 people. The helicopters evacuated 23 people Monday, but the Marine deployment had to be suspended.

On Wednesday, explosions boomed in Monrovia, a day after rebel leaders announced a unilateral cease-fire.

“This morning we’re still under attack,” Defense Minister Daniel Chea said. “It’s still raining round after round of mortars.”

As for the rebels’ cease-fire pledge, Chea said, “I’m not impressed at all.”

Lt. Gen. Roland Duo said shortly before dusk that loyalist forces had driven rebels off Monrovia’s Stockton Bridge, captured by the rebels early in the day.

Fighting over the bridge had sent refugees fleeing by the thousands, as Taylor’s forces – many of them teenagers armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers – battled the rebel advance.

Aid workers were cut off from the city’s cemeteries by the battles, so they buried victims on the beaches, shoveling corpses into the sand under driving rains near the stormy, steel-gray Atlantic. More dead lay uncollected in the streets.

Fighting has pushed hundreds of thousands of civilians into Monrovia, swelling the normal population of 1 million.

Battles since Saturday have cut the city off from food and water, with rebels taking the port where aid warehouses are filled with food.

Near the U.S. Embassy, vendors were selling individual cups of flour and corn meal from stolen World Food Program bags. Merchants said fighters looted the bags from warehouses and then sold them.

Dozens of disabled people in wheelchairs gathered in front of the embassy, chanting, “We want food! We want food!”

The U.S. Embassy remains staffed and heavily guarded by American forces, and is the key hope for residents of this nation founded by freed American slaves in the 19th century.

“I used to go beg in the streets but now there is nobody outside,” said James Sando, an 18-year-old polio victim in a wooly blue cap and a wheelchair.

“That is why I came to the embassy, to tell them if they can’t give us peace that they must give us food.”

Families used any lulls in fighting to search for food.

“My smallest one keeps saying, ‘Pappy, I want to eat.’ He is 6 years old. He knows nothing about these wars,” said Emmanuel Jackson, 55, trying to feed his wife and seven children, sheltered under concrete stairs in an apartment building since the fighting.

Aid workers said Wednesday they were logging 350 new cholera cases a week, and expected the epidemic to surge.

Rebels have taken the area where a water plant was run by the European Union. With no running water since at least Saturday, the city was depending on wells, many contaminated.

In Dakar, West African leaders said two Nigerian battalions of 650 men each would be deployed within days. The battalions were on standby in Nigeria and in Liberia’s neighbor, Sierra Leone.

Brown, the Taylor aide, said in Accra, Ghana, that the president will leave when those battalions arrive.

“When interposition force arrives, Mr. Taylor will leave,” Brown said. “Taylor will step down with the arrival and deployment of interpositional force.”

Chea suggested Taylor will remain as long as fighting rages. “he president has definitely agreed to go to Nigeria,” Chea told The Associated Press. “But he is not going to go under these circumstances.”

Rebels derided Taylor’s latest departure pledge.

“Taylor is just bluffing,” rebel spokesman Kabineh Ja’neh said in Ghana. “You know how many times he has said this kind of thing? We’ll make sure he leaves.”

West African foreign ministers also called for an additional stabilization force of 3,250 men – much larger than previously discussed.

West African leaders want the United States to participate in a peacekeeping force, but American officials have not committed troops. However, three U.S. ships carrying 2,000 Marines were moving toward the Mediterranean Sea and awaiting orders.

President Bush has made any deployment of U.S. troops conditional on Taylor’s departure.

The New York Times reported Taylor said he would step aside within 10 days and hand power to the speaker of the House of Representatives, Yundueh Monorkomna. Taylor will make the formal announcement Saturday, the Times said.