Liberia: An emergency convoy of jeeps screamed through Monrovia's empty streets yesterday morning, carrying the bloodied and wounded from the vicious dawn attack. Declan Walsh reports.
Shells slammed into the city centre from about 7 a.m. killing at least two dozen civilians huddling in the crowded camps that dot the compact downtown and diplomatic area.
The wounded were rushed across the city in the aid agency convoy to a makeshift Red Cross hospital. As the jeeps jammed to a halt outside, a woman stripped to underwear wailed as she was stretchered inside. A small boy, his legs wrapped in cardboard, was carried behind her.
After a week of heavy fighting - the third such offensive in six weeks - many Liberians felt the outside world had all but forgotten them.
As shells smashed into the buildings where they sought shelter, Liberians once again pleaded for foreign intervention.
"We need the intervention force now," said Sao Sambola, a Ministry of Finance official as he cowered inside a school classroom. "If we have to wait another three or four or five days, we will surely die." Fresh announcements in Washington and neighbouring West African countries meant help may finally be on the way. And by evening the main rebel group announced yet another ceasefire.
But as ever, delay and obfuscation clouded the promises.
Earlier this week the US military amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima, leading a three-ship group carrying 2,300 marines, entered the Mediterranean for possible duty.
White House spokesman Mr Scott McClellan said the US mission would be "limited in time and scope". He did not say whether they would be engaged in active peacekeeping, or just logistical support for the west Africans.
The United Nations' special envoy for Liberia, Mr Jacques Paul Klein, said on Thursday that an initial battalion of 770 Nigerian soldiers was expected to go into Liberia in seven to 10 days. But the mission, organised by the regional Ecowas bloc, remains bogged down.
A planned deployment of 1,300 Nigerian soldiers has been delayed several times. Monday is set as a last date for a definite deployment.
Nigerian officials privately say the delay is due to debate over who will pay the soldiers, and how much. For the remaining embattled aid workers, there have been too many dashed hopes of outside help.
"I'm not impressed," said Mr Sam Nagbe of Oxfam. "The US is the world superpower. They have all the logistical and financial might. We expected them to be playing a leading role, not just sending a ship off the coast." After the worst of yesterday's barrage, a woman wrapped in white stood before the US embassy to protest, a now familiar rite for desperate Liberians.
"We're tired! We're tired!" she cried, raising her arms beseechingly in the air. A marine peered at her through binoculars from behind the armour-plated glass of the embassy building.
Fighting continued for most of the day on the city outskirts, as the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy rebels (LURD) and President Taylor's mostly teenage fighters battled for control of strategic bridges.
By evening the death toll rose to over 23. Displaced people said more had been killed in an area called Chocolate City.
The LURD ordered its troops to hold their positions and stop fighting. A similar order some days ago, issued by political representatives at peace talks in Ghana, was widely ignored by troops on the ground.
But because this cessation was ordered by the LURD military command, there are hopes it may stick. Nevertheless aid groups were preparing for a continuation of hostilities.
The British agency Merlin was making sandbags from empty food sacks. Stray bullets had hit 55 people in Greystone, a camp opposite the US embassy, on Wednesday and Thursday. The eight-foot piles of sandbags should reduce the toll, said Mr Magnus Wolfe Murray.
"We call them the walls of life," he said.
The Scottish aid worker said he was angry about the lack of western intervention in Liberia. "I'm sick to the stomach this has been allowed to happen. I've taken bodies out of Graystone, of little children who were massacred. I know there are complications for the Americans. But people are dying here."
By late afternoon, a strange air of normality had returned to some streets in Monrovia. With the shelling apparently over near the US embassy, thousands of people poured out of their hiding places and on to the streets to sell food, or exchange gossip. Leaflets circulated advertising a prayer crusade by Dr K.A. Paul, an American evangelist who was recently interviewed with the embattled President Taylor
The advertisement boasted that Rev Paul had "preached to more people than any other human".
Mr Taylor, who has been indicted for war crimes by a UN-backed court, has said he will step down and head into exile once foreign troops arrive.
He has accepted an offer of asylum in Nigeria but remains holed up in his executive mansion in a Monrovian suburb under his control.
President Bush yesterday repeated his demand that Mr Taylor leave as a pre-condition for US deployment.
Yet if the battle for the capital reignites this weekend, it is uncertain that any force will be able to deploy.