"Abidjan and the west are now the serious threats to peace we're at a crucial moment," said Col Maurin. The rebels have promised to wait for a week, reserving their right to resume the attack. On Thursday, President Laurent Gbagbo, who came to power in a violent election from which many northerners were excluded, revoked a French- brokered agreement to share power with the MPCI. In Abidjan itself, the UN last week reported 300 ethnic and political murders carried out by death squads "close to the government and the presidential guard". They tell of ethnically-targetted killing, and routine murder and rape.
Now, two more recent rebellions in the west are evoking bitter memories of neighbouring wars, with refugees reporting redundant rebels pouring over from Liberia and Sierra Leone. Since September the country has been split into north and south, with only a thin line of French troops preventing the well-organised Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast (MPCI) sweeping south to Abidjan. If France is to stop Ivory Coast going the way of neighbouring Liberia and Sierra Leone, it will probably need to be. Western diplomats say the true number may be far higher. Last week, the latest contingent of 450 French troops arrived in Abidjan, to protect 25,000 French citizens and 220 French businesses and taking the official total to 3,000. But these keep coming." "We're fighting them almost hand-to-hand - the guys are taking them out at 10 metres." Over the past three months, little noticed by a world obsessed by a possible war with Iraq, France has been drawn deeper and deeper into an actual war splitting one of Africa's richest countries three ways, and displacing more than a million people so far.
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When real soldiers open fire in Africa, rebels run everyone knows that. "The rebels here are bloody crazy," he says. Legionnaire Alan Barnes, a Dubliner with 15 years' service in the legion, tries to explain why things are going so badly wrong. They have killed at least 50 of their attackers, and probably many more, admits their commander Col Emmanuel Maurin. Over the past two months, the 140 legionnaires dug in around Duekoue, 150 miles west of Abidjan, Ivory Coast's main city, have come under attack eight times. Yet here in Ivory Coast's humid west, despite a two-week lull in fighting between the main parties, the French foreign legion is indisputably at war.
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The patrol is ostensibly monitoring a ceasefire, following France's recent efforts to quell the three rebellions mushrooming in its most treasured former African colony. One by one, the legionnaires follow - an anxious- looking Belgian, an unmistakable American, four men with Slavic features hidden behind Aviator shades - drawing France further into the most violent theatre of west Africa's new war. The lead man rises, beckons, and cautiously points his gun back up the track. But nothing stirs except chattering insects and startled birds.
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The French foreign legionnaires reach a blind spot in the red earth track, halt, and drop silently as cats into western Ivory Coast's tangled bush.