February
25, 2011 4:10:40 PM
* Rebels take town in west, announce
advance south
* Residents flee as rival forces
clash in Abidjan
* Shots heard in capital
Yamoussoukro
(Adds confirmation town seized) By
Loucoumane Coulibaly and Charles
Bamba
ABIDJAN/BOUAKE, Ivory Coast, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Rebels
controlling northern Ivory Coast have seized a town in government territory and
said on Friday they were still advancing, raising the prospects of a return to
open war.
Loyalists of Laurent Gbagbo,
clinging to power after an election most of the world says he lost, confirmed
the fall of Zouan-Hounien in an overnight attack and said they would fight to
take it back.
"We're in the process of
re-organising ourselves," Yao Yao, head of operations of the pro-Gbagbo Front for
the Liberation of the Greater
West militia told Reuters by phone from the region.
The small, remote town lies in
western Ivory Coast near the forested border with Liberia and is not on a key axis, but the
fighting there marks a major escalation after a week of growing violence in the
world's biggest cocoa
producer.
Rebel spokesman Ouattara Seydou said the New Forces had been
attacked from Zouan-Hounien and were moving south to another town held by
Gbagbo loyalists.
Ivory Coast's spiral back towards a
war fuelled by ethnic animosities follows an election last November which Gbagbo's
rival Alassane Ouattara
is almost universally recognised to have won.
Gbagbo, in power for more than a
decade, has refused to leave the presidency of once prosperous Ivory Coast,
which has been split between north and south since a 2002-03 war.
SPREADING VIOLENCE
African Union efforts to end the
crisis through diplomacy have made no headway.
The spreading violence has killed
more than 300 people according to the United Nations, but diplomats think that figure
hugely understated because the military rarely discloses its casualties or
civilians killed by soldiers.
The threat to supplies has pushed
cocoa futures to their highest in more than 30 years.
Gun battles raged overnight in the
Abobo neighbourhood of the main city of Abidjan where insurgents, dubbed by local media the
"invisible commandos", have risen up against Gbagbo.
"Gun shots were echoing
everywhere throughout the night and there was heavy arms fire," said
resident Souala Tiemoko as hundreds of people marched along the road out of the
district of quarter of a million, salvaging whatever belongings they could.
Gbagbo's government spokesman Ahoua Don Mello says the gunmen in
Abobo are rebels who have come down from the north.
Ouattara's parallel government,
operating out of a hotel guarded by U.N. peacekeepers, says they are civilians and
army defectors who have taken up arms against Gbagbo.
Elsewhere in Abidjan, members
of the pro-Gbagbo "Young Patriots" erected roadblocks and set fire to
buses and taxis after their leader Charles Ble Goude called on people to set
up "self-defence" units to protect themselves from the rebels.
Shots were also heard in the
official capital Yamoussoukro.
Fleeing businesses, and economic
sanctions by the European Union and United States aiming to squeeze Gbagbo are fast
wrecking the economy of this once prosperous nation.
Ivory Coast's 80,000 barrel per day SIR refinery, a
target of Western sanctions, said on Friday it was operating "at a
minimum" and is struggling to secure crude oil.
The U.N. refugee agency said it had
reports that the number of people crossing into neighbouring Liberia had
jumped from around 100 per day to 5,000 after the latest clashes in western
Ivory Coast. (Additional reporting by Ange Aboa, Luc Gnago and Tim Cocks; writing by David Lewis and Tim Cocks; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)
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