THOUSANDS of machete-wielding thugs looted and set fire to French targets in Ivory Coast yesterday after France responded with force to the killing of nine of its peacekeepers and an American missionary.

Crowds urged on by hardline politicians laid siege to a French military base and carried out house-to-house searches for terrified French families in Abidjan, the country’s largest city and commercial capital.

Laurent Gbagbo, the Ivory Coast President, appealed for calm last night and urged protesters to return home.

Earlier French forces had destroyed the entire Ivorian Air Force and killed an unknown number of troops in response to a government air attack on the rebel-held town of Bouaké, in which the peacekeepers and the missionary were killed.

About 600 French reinforcements arrived yesterday from nearby Gabon to support the 4,000-strong French force already in the Ivory Coast to police a peace deal between the Government and rebels that was signed in January last year. The French also put three Mirage fighter jets on standby.

Rioters who took to the streets in Abidjan late on Saturday and early yesterday brandished axes, machetes and clubs as they roamed the streets shouting “French go home!” and “Everybody get your Frenchman!” One French resident said by telephone from his home: “We are all terrified and try to reassure each other. We have been told by the embassy to stay at home. It is a difficult situation.”

The African Union said that it was sending President Mbeki of South Africa on an urgent mission to try to prevent a return to full-scale war. The United Nations and France demanded that President Gbagbo end the fighting and rein in his forces.

However, defiant Ivorian leaders told their supporters to take to the streets. “Show France we are a sovereign state,” Geneviève Bro Grébé, a loyalist hardline leader, urged on state television.

Mamadou Coulibaly, the Speaker of the National Assembly, said that the French had killed 30 people and wounded more than 100 in clashes in Yamoussoukro, the capital, and Abidjan — a claim strongly denied by the French military authorities.

On Saturday French forces, said to be acting on the orders of President Chirac, took over Abidjan’s international airport and destroyed two Sukhoi-25 warplanes and five helicopter gunships — believed to comprise the entire Ivorian Air Force.

Mr Coulibaly dismissed suggestions that President Gbagbo should stand down. “It is out of the question,” he said. “We are going towards a big civil war, an uprising like we have probably never seen before in Africa.”

Meanwhile, the ruling Ivorian Popular Front ruling party, which has consistently refused to implement a power-sharing agreement with the rebels, called yesterday for Ivorian youths to fight French and UN soldiers until “the final victory”.

Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, telephoned Mr Gbagbo twice to urge him to stop the violence. At an emergency session on Saturday, the UN Security Council gave the 10,000 French and other international peacekeepers a green light to use “all necessary means” to stop the fighting.

France has proposed a draft UN resolution for an arms embargo, a travel ban on key figures accused of derailing the peace process and a freeze on their overseas assets.

France been caught in the middle of the turmoil in Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cocoa producer, since rebels seized the north after a failed attempt to oust Mr Gbagbo in September 2002. Thousands of people were killed before a truce was agreed in May 2003, but both sides blamed France for preventing them from achieving an all-out victory.

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