Civilians Flee Fighting In Liberia

Rebels attacked the central stronghold of President Charles Taylor on Thursday in some of the fiercest fighting of Liberia's 3-year-old insurrection, sending frightened, wounded civilians caught in the cross fire fleeing by the thousands.

Screaming in pain, women and children with gunshot wounds — sustained in what authorities said was fighting between government forces and rebels — filled a hospital in the stronghold town, Gbarnga.

Nurses and doctors struggled overnight to find a means to evacuate the injured and dying as fighting engulfed the town.

Most medical workers already had had fled their posts there "for fear of their lives," nurse Mary Teah said late Wednesday, as doctors treated a wailing 4-year-old boy who had been shot in the shoulder.

Elsewhere in the hospital, dozens of women wailed from the agony of their own bullet wounds. Many of the women had been shot directly in the abdomen, medical workers said.

The flight comes as rebels of the shadowy Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy are intensifying their offensive against Taylor's forces in the heart of the West African nation.

Many of the fighters on both sides are combatants from Liberia's 1989-96 civil war, which ended with Taylor winning a postwar 1997 presidential election.

Speaking Thursday in Monrovia, the capital, Taylor said the rebels had attacked the town directly at sunrise. Fighting was ongoing there.

Monrovia's residents listened anxiously to his speech, broadcast live on his Kiss FM radio station, with ears glued to radio handsets.

"We must bring to an end this cycle of violence," Taylor said.

The Liberian leader added that "this country has a right to protect itself."

Carrying mattresses and bundles of belongings on their heads, civilians swarmed down the road from Gbarnga toward Monrovia, about 100 miles away.

Panicked refugees Thursday said many civilians had been killed, but could give no numbers.

A Liberian commander, Gen. Coucou Dennis, said late Wednesday that Liberian soldiers were fighting rebels 25 miles outside of Gbarnga, between the towns of Weinsu and Belefanai.

"Welcome to my base," Dennis told The Associated Press, holding a satellite telephone receiver in one hand, and waving an imported beer in the other.

"You see the town deserted because civilians are afraid, but this town will not fall," insisted another Liberian fighter, a colonel, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We don't know the strength of the aggressors, but we know the terrain better than the aggressors."

Taylor accuses neighboring Guinea of sheltering the rebels. Taylor and his government and military are under a U.N. arms embargo and other sanctions for what the United Nations said this week is continuing gun- and diamond-running with the brutal rebels next-door in Sierra Leone.

U.S.-based Human Rights Watch accused Taylor's forces of numerous atrocities against civilians in the course of battling the insurrection, including burning alive and shooting dozens of noncombatants.

The international aid group Medecins sans Frontieres confirmed that 5,000 civilians had fled the town of Weinsu alone, leaving that town empty.

Others in flight included many of the 15,000 people who had taken shelter at U.N.-supervised camps outside Gbargna after escaping fighting in northern Liberia's Lofa County last year.

"We are following the road. Wherever the night catches us, we will sleep there," said one resident of the town, 47-year-old Musu Kollie said. "But to remain in Gbarnga in the face of what we see is like giving your own life away."