DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — United only by their hatred of Charles Taylor, rebels fighting to oust him lack any other evident common bond, political ideology or credible follow-up plan if the Liberian leader does fall.

While Liberia’s neighbours are backing the rebels as a defence against West Africa’s number one troublemaker, the region’s troubles threaten to persist — and spread — if rebel power-struggles and anarchy follow Taylor’s exit.

Two possible outs exist for Liberia, a nation founded by freed 19th-century American slaves: that Liberia’s little-educated and politically unsophisticated rebels somehow muster a leader, or that the world somehow musters a peace force. Both look equally unlikely absent making for possibly a great deal of further bloodshed.

“Liberia is in limbo and our future is bleak. Only God almighty can rescue us from this nightmare,” declared Romeo Smith, a baker without work in a starving capital run out of flour.

Leaning against a light post with his hands folded, Smith spoke Friday with stray rockets pounding into crowded neighbourhoods as rebels battled government forces for Monrovia’s port.

Guinea and Ivory Coast are believed to be arming the two rebel groups, drawn from ragtag elements fuelled by grudges over Taylor’s 14 years of West African warmongering.

Many of the rebels are former combatants from Liberia’s devastating seven-year civil war, which Taylor launched in 1989.

That war ended with Taylor bullying his way into the presidency, in 1997, and Taylor’s rivals shut out of all power and nursing their hatreds.

The oldest, northern-based rebel movement, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, is the one laying siege to Monrovia. Its rocket barrages and artillery rounds have contributed to a death toll in the high hundreds this week among the capital’s trapped civilians.

Instigators of the three-year-old campaign against Taylor, the bush-based rebel movement, is as inept at courting international opinion as their ill-chosen acronym — LURD — implies.

Unpolished, AK-47-powered commanders boast noms de guerre like Nasty Duke and Bush Dog.

LURD leaders distinguished themselves in the past by their inability to make it through a satellite-telephone interview touting their democratic aims without lapsing into indecipherable screaming of inchoate rage against Taylor.

Aware in the past year that they could actually win, the rebels have taken steps to polish their image, seeking international approval as future leaders of Liberia.

Rebels have pushed forward senior commanders as political figures and negotiators. Using satellite phones and e-mail in outposts and rain forest camps, they issue manifestos that try to talk the talk they know international leaders want to hear.

One typo-ridden LURD statement declared in May: “Relative to the mechanics og governance, the leadership/LURD reassures all skeptics, civil societies, pressure groups, political parties and the international community that LURD shall restore and forster the growth of a healthy democracy and return Liberia to its rightful place in the International fora.”

Guinea is widely believed to be providing military backing and bases to LURD.

The key link is Guinea President Lansana Conte’s spiritual adviser — none other than the wife of titular LURD leader Sekou Conneh.

Guinea’s own military has limited military support from the United States, which is trying to prop up one of the region’s few stable countries.

Taylor sees that as US military support for rebels. American diplomatic and military advisers in the region generally insist that’s not so, even though Taylor is no friend of the United States.

Guinea’s interest, like Ivory Coast’s, is blocking Taylor’s efforts to drag its own countries down. Sierra Leone went that way, bloodied by a Taylor-supported rebel movement that fought a losing 10-year terror campaign for that country’s diamonds.

The backing earned Taylor a UN-Sierra Leone war crimes indictment, announced June 4. Guinea and Ivory Coast both accuse Taylor of sending armed killers into their countries as well.

LURD formed in 1999, just across the border from Guinea.

Earlier this year, a new rebel movement appeared in eastern Liberia, along the border with Ivory Coast. Its fighters were better armed, its commanders better-trained than LURD’s. More image-savvy, the new rebels did better than LURD’s acronym: the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, or MODEL.

MODEL’s origins were a mystery, as the band efficiently took eastern port cities and then slowly rolled to a disciplined stop.

The movement today is generally believed to be the child of Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo, who devised MODEL simply to block the vicious fighters that Liberia was pouring into Ivory Coast’s own civil war, now halted.

MODEL, like LURD, appears to have a large number of ethnic Krahn, one of the northern-based Liberian ethnic groups that saw themselves as shut out by Taylor.

Each rebel group’s saving grace is that its fighters have shown far less viciousness than Taylor’s, with less of the sadistic robbery, rapes and killings of helpless civilians.

Western diplomats’ chief fear if Taylor falls is a fight for power among MODEL, LURD and splinter factions within the groups — with the one-million-resident city of Monrovia as the battlefield.

The United States, Liberia’s colonial-era sponsor, shows no inclination to lead an armed intervention as Britain did to bring peace to former colony Sierra Leone.

US diplomats speak officially of a LURD-MODEL power-sharing transition government — hoping international recognition is enough of an incentive for both groups to behave themselves.

Absent that, Westerners in Liberia speak wishfully of MODEL stepping in as the good guy — stopping LURD and Liberian government forces from laying waste to Monrovia.