U.S. schoolchildren evacuated from Ivory Coast school
Christine Nesbitt/AP American children from the Ecole Baptiste International Christian Academy in Bouake, Ivory Coast, wave from a bus as they are evacuated Wednesday.
Staff and wire reports
BOUAKE, Ivory Coast -- American schoolchildren waving U.S. flags evacuated a rebel-held city under French military escort Wednesday, as U.S. special forces landed in this West African nation to help rescue Westerners caught in its deadliest uprising.
The convoy of 10 to 12 cars left Bouake bound for Yamoussoukro, 40 miles to the south, where U.S. special forces in C-130s arrived hours earlier to receive them.
Many wearing T-shirts sporting American flags, children in the convoy swung flags out car windows as the convoy headed to safety down the region's main road, after a new night of sporadic gunfire outside the International Christian Academy.
About 100 American children ages 5 to 18 attend the mission boarding school, intended for sons and daughters of missionaries based across Africa. Another 60 children also attend the school, which has a staff of 40, most of whom are American.
U.S. military C-130s carrying the U.S. troops touched down at 2 p.m. in Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast's central capital and staging area for a French rescue mission earlier Wednesday to the cut-off, rebel-held city of Bouake.
Richard Buangan, an American diplomat helping to coordinate at the staging area, said about 300 Americans were trapped in Bouake.
"Our idea is to get as many out as possible," Richard Buangan, a U.S. diplomat helping to coordinate at the staging area, said of the Americans.
U.S. special forces troops spilled out of C-130s at the rescue staging area in Yammoussoukro, 40 miles to the south of the rebel city. Unloading duffel bags and metal boxes, U.S. commandoes set up base on the side of the airport tarmac. The American troops refused comment as they worked.
Bouake and the northern opposition stronghold of Korhogo fell into rebel hands during a bloody coup attempt Thursday. The uprising killed at least 270 people in its first days.
Ivory Coast's military and government has pledged to retake both cities. The country's military officers said only concern for civilian casualties was staving off full-scale attack.
Firing broke out again on both sides of the mission around daybreak Wednesday, said Neil Gilliland, speaking by telephone from the affiliated Free Will Baptist Missions in Nashville, Tenn. "Nobody was firing at them, but there was gunfire all around," Gilliland said.
Water and electricity in Bouake had been cut since the weekend, most shops were shuttered, and prices of food and fuel were skyrocketing, they said. Few braved the rebel barricades thrown up across the city.
"Everyone is at home. We're running out of everything," said one frightened Ivorian woman, contacted by telephone as she cowered in her home in Bouake. "We are scared."
In Yamoussoukro, a handful of American soldiers jumped off the planes on touchdown at mid-afternoon, securing the tarmac as gun-mounted Humvees drove off the ramps.
Armed U.S. troops, some in helmets, then filed down onto the airstrip.
The insurgency -- with a core group of 750-800 ex-soldiers angry over their dismissal from the army for suspected disloyalty -- poses Ivory Coast's worst crisis since the country's first-ever coup in 1999 shattered stability in the once-prosperous country.
The uprising has sparked ethnic, political and religious hostilities that divide Ivory Coast's predominantly Christian south and its largely Muslim north.
The mutineers, dismissed from the army for suspected loyalty to ousted former junta leader Gen. Robert Guei, have found at least a measure of support from the Muslim northerners -- who complain of being treated as second-class citizens by the southern-based government.
Tens of thousands of Westerners and hundreds of thousands of immigrants from neighboring Muslim countries have made their homes in Ivory Coast, until its first-ever 1999 coup an anchor of stability and prosperity in West Africa.
Ivory Coast is the world's largest cocoa-producer, and remains an economic powerhouse for the region.
The nation's Muslim, African immigrants are much more vulnerable than the Westerners in the unrest, with much less hope of rescue. Paramilitary police burned a shantytown -- housing numbers of Muslim immigrants and northerners -- over the weekend.
Gbagbo's government blames Guei in Thursday's coup attempt.
Loyalist paramilitary police shot and killed Guei in the first hours of the uprising. His family and aides, and some insurgents, challenge the government contention that the ex-junta leader was behind the uprising.
Ranging in age from 5- to 18 years old, children at the International Christian Academy have been pinned down in the rebel-held city of Bouake since a Thursday coup attempt, with rebels at one time breaching the campus. About 200 foreigners in all live at the school, the majority of them American.
"They are very happy," Gilliland said of students and staff at the arrival of the French soldiers.
The well-armed French forces secured the campus, school security officer Mike Cousineau told the Nashville base.
French forces in Ivory Coast, a former French colony, had deployed hundreds of troops, trucks and helicopters in the central capital, Yamoussoukro, to rescue Westerners from Bouake if needed.
Missionaries have sent up increasingly fervent calls for help since Monday night when rebels breached the walls of the school and fired from its grounds. No students or staff have been reported injured.
In Georgia, friends and relatives of missionary families in the embattled region kept their eyes on the news and their hearts in prayer.
The U.S. and French military deployment came amid reports of heavy gunfire in BouakZ, where the children were at the 12-acre campus of the International Christian Academy. The city was seized by rebels last week, and the fighting has killed at least 270 people.
David Harvey, an associate professor at Toccoa Falls College in North Georgia, said Tuesday his daughter and son-in-law, Judy and J.P. Schultz, and three granddaughters are among those trapped at the academy.
The Schultzes are "dorm parents," in charge of about 20 high school girls. Their daughters, 12-year-old twins Stephanie and Alexis and 10-year-old Jordana, attend the school.
"They were surrounded by forces that were firing over the walls of the school," Harvey said. "They feel fairly safe there. But it has been so stressful."
James Forlines, director of Free Will Baptist Foreign Missions in Nashville, was in direct telephone contact throughout the day with the school's director, Dan Grudda, and security director, Mike Cousineau.
"Trucks came down off the hill shooting toward the school," Forlines said he was told by Cousineau.
"It's possible that they were shooting at another target. [But] at the time, the bullets were hitting all around the campus," he said. "At that moment, [schools officials] said, 'We are taking fire.' "
Forlines verified that 26 children and staff members at the academy call Georgia home. The school has 161 students and 38 staff members, he said.
Students at Toccoa Falls have been praying for the safety of the children and missionaries, Harvey said. "When you go out as a missionary, you go with the idea that your life is always on the line. You never know. But wherever God leads you, you are ready. We have the Lord's promise to be with us. So we go with that assurance -- that we are under His care," he said.
Toccoa Falls College, about 85 miles northwest of Atlanta, prepares students for missionary work around the world. Nearly a dozen Toccoa Falls alumni are stationed in Ivory Coast cities, Harvey said.
Sixteen Christian denominations have missions in Ivory Coast or neighboring countries. Many send their children to the Bouaké academy, a private boarding school operated by Conservative Baptists International.
Harvey received an e-mail Tuesday from the school's crisis management team that said: "Please continue to pray for our safety. . . . Most of the day there has been gunfire in the distance and at other times nearby."
Susan Mayo of Covington, who graduated in 1992 from the Ivory Coast school, said its students and alumni are like an extended family.
Mayo, who was born in Ivory Coast, said that in the early 1990s students practiced evacuation drills.
"We had an escape bag with water and food, an outfit or two, enough to survive one day if need be," she said. "It was scary. But you never figured it would happen. Kind of like we never figured Sept. 11 would happen here."
The fighting erupted when government troops drove rebel forces from the country's commercial capital, Abidjan, on Thursday.
The rebels fled to Bouaké and the northern city of Korhogo. Government forces Tuesday claimed their troops had made their way into Bouaké, but rebels disputed the report.
A resident of Korhogo said by telephone that rebels were firing automatic weapons into the air and patrolling the streets.
As fighting continued in the center and north of the former French colony, there were signs the political atmosphere was deteriorating. Top opposition leader Alassane Dramane Ouattara on Tuesday accused government forces of trying to kill him during the coup attempt last week.
Speaking by telephone from the French Embassy, where he had sought safety during the uprising, Ouattara said an attempt was made on his life Thursday by paramilitary police.
"It's clear they are using this situation to try to liquidate and eliminate people in my party," he said.
Ouattara's supporters, who are predominantly Muslim northerners, have clashed frequently with President Laurent Gbagbo's mostly Christian backers in the south. In 2000, hundreds of people were killed in street fighting triggered by presidential elections, from which Ouattara was excluded.
No Westerners are known to have been hurt in the latest fighting.
Far more exposed are immigrants from neighboring Muslim countries, some of whom have been attacked in Abidjan.
-- Staff writer Yolanda Rodriguez and The Associated Press contributed to this report.