No Letup in Liberia Fighting as Rebels Hit Neighborhoods

Liberian rebel leaders’ call for a cease-fire failed to take hold Wednesday, as insurgents lobbed mortar shells at neighborhoods crowded with refugees and briefly captured a key bridge in this capital city.

Boosting security around the U.S. Embassy, American military helicopters swept into the city carrying 20 Marine reinforcements, completing deployment of a 41-member team. As fog engulfed the rain-soaked capital, the aircraft flew out again with 18 American and European evacuees -- aid workers, journalists and members of a U.S. team sent to evaluate conditions for a possible U.S. deployment.

With no letup in fighting, West African leaders pledged Wednesday to send two Nigerian battalions to Liberia within days-- the vanguard of what they said should be a 3,250-strong international force to bring peace. The first Nigerian battalion, 770 strong, would arrive in a week, officials said.

In Accra, Ghana’s capital, a top aide to Liberian President Charles Taylor pledged that Taylor would leave the day Nigerian troops arrived.

Rebels, pressing home a three-year war to oust Taylor, derided his most recent promise to surrender control.

“Taylor is just bluffing.... We’ll make sure he leaves,” rebel spokesman Kabineh Janeh said in Ghana, site of off-and-on peace talks for Liberia.

Since June, rebels have launched three waves of attacks on Monrovia. Fighting has killed hundreds of civilians trapped in the capital.

Cut off from the city’s cemeteries by the battles, aid workers, their faces masked, buried victims of the fighting on Monrovia’s beaches Wednesday, digging into the sand under driving rain next to the stormy, steel-gray Atlantic.

More dead lay in the streets, making the death toll since the latest surge in fighting impossible to calculate.

U.S. Ambassador to Liberia John W. Blaney condemned the attacks and expressed “deepest sympathies regarding the tragic loss of life” in a joint statement with U.S. defense officials at the embassy.

The United States has yet to say whether it will take part in any military intervention in Liberia, as West African and U.N. leaders and many Liberians have urged. Liberia was founded by freed American slaves with U.S. support in the 19th century.

By midday Wednesday, rebels based in Monrovia’s northwestern port area had crossed Stockton Bridge into the New Georgia suburb, Lt. Gen. Roland Duo said. Government forces -- many of them teenagers armed with AK-47s and grenade launchers -- beat back the rebel advance by dusk.

Battles since Saturday have cut the overwhelmed city off from food and water supplies.

Near the embassy, where at least 10,000 refugees have crowded into a diplomatic residential compound in search of safety, vendors Wednesday were selling flour and cornmeal from stolen World Food Program bags, a cup at a time.

Aid workers have been logging 350 new cholera cases a week and expect the epidemic to surge as civilians draw water from an inadequate number of wells, many contaminated.