MONROVIA, Liberia — The military said rebels had taken control Friday of part of President Charles Taylor's stronghold town in the heart of Liberia, pressing an offensive that has tens of thousands of civilians fleeing.
A "multitude" of people were on the road seeking safety, said one fleeing resident, Papa Flomo. He spoke from a hospital in Monrovia, where victims of the fighting in Gbarnga were evacuated overnight.
The battle at Taylor's base at Gbarnga — 110 miles to the east of Monrovia — marks one of the boldest strikes in a three-year-old rebel uprising in the West African nation's interior.
Rebels of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy attacked Gbarnga on Thursday, bypassing other towns to strike directly at what Liberia's government calls the "spiritual headquarters" of Taylor's supporters.
Taylor, himself a former rebel, used the town as his base in Liberia's ruinous 1989-96 civil war. He maintains a massive plantation at the town, connected to Monrovia by one of Liberia's few good roads.
Military officials said Friday that rebels had taken control of the police station in Gbarnga.
Liberia's armed forces said they were in a hard battle on three fronts to assume full control of the town.
Rebels themselves are believed to be relatively few in number, and specialize in hit-and-run attacks. Taylor says the rebels are from the losing side in the war, and accuses neighboring Guinea of harboring them.
Diplomats have privately accused Taylor of exaggerating the threat of the rebels — even, some diplomats say, stage-managing the attacks — to win lifting of a U.N. arms embargo against Liberia and provide an excuse for postponing elections set for 2003.
The U.N. Security Council on Monday voted to extend the arms embargo and other sanctions for another year.
The Security Council said Taylor was still actively supporting rebel groups in other countries, especially neighboring Sierra Leone.
Taylor on Thursday renewed his call for lifting of the sanctions, saying on a live national broadcast, "if you lift the arms embargo on Liberia, the war will be over in 30 days."
However unclear the motives and movers in the insurrection, the toll on civilians is indisputable.
On Friday, doctors and nurses at a hospital in the east of Monrovia tended to dozens of patients who had been brought by bus from a besieged hospital on the outskirts of Gbarnga.
Most — women and children among them — had suffered gunshot wounds from what authorities say is cross-fire between government and rebel forces.
Speaking of the evacuation, one wounded man, 48-year-old Kofi Johnny, said, "It was not easy. The rebels were advancing. But God made a way for us to leave."
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch has accused Liberian forces of looting towns and shooting, burning and raping civilians in the course of battling the insurrection.
According to aid groups and refugees, the current offensive has emptied the roughly 30,000 resident town of Gbarnga and three camps there holding 20,000 people who had fled fighting to the north last year.
Medicins Sans Frontieres said the town of Weinsu, to the north of Gbarnga, also had been deserted by its roughly 5,000 people.
Gbarnga is midway between Monrovia and the Ivory Coast border. Many of those fleeing were said to be headed east, toward Ivory Coast.