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Char les Taylor, who has bowed to intense pressure and announced he will step down as Liberia's president on August 11, is a charismatic but brutal former warlord who masterminded conflicts in west Africa and stands accused of war crimes.

Taylor, the head of an army that includes child warriors who call him "pappy," agreed to hand over power exactly six years after becoming president of this west African state - and is now likely to go into exile in Nigeria.

US President George W Bush has repeatedly demanded that he step down as part of any peace deal.

Liberians call the flamboyantly dressed Dahkpannah Charles Ghankay Taylor "superglue" because of the way money sticks to him.

Not only has Taylor helped bring his own country to the brink of ruin, but he has masterminded conflicts in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.

He is indicted by a UN-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone, where he is said to have armed and trained rebels in exchange for diamonds.

The war there was characterised by appalling violence, including deliberate amputation of limbs and the recruitment of thousands of drug-induced children into a rabble army.

For the past three years, Taylor has fended off attacks by rebel forces in Liberia who have seized about 80% of the territory, but his hand was forced after rebels closed in on the coastal capital Monrovia in the latest bout of fighting.

Born in 1948 to a US father and a Liberian mother, Taylor is a child of both America and Africa, like the country he nominally heads, which was founded in the 19th century as a haven for freed black slaves from the US.

Like many American-Liberians, he was educated in the US - at Bentley College in Massachusetts, a business-oriented school.

Taylor later joined Liberia's civil service as head of an agency responsible for controlling the budget.

Then-president Samuel Doe later accused him of embezzling $900 000 in government funds and Taylor fled to the US, where he was jailed on an extradition warrant.

A thrice-married lay preacher, Taylor returned to west Africa in December 1989, crossing the border from Ivory Coast as the leader of a rebel force, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia.

The force reportedly had backing from both Libya and Burkina Faso and was soon to gain a reputation for extreme violence.

The ensuing civil war saw the rise of other factions.

But Taylor climbed to the top during the violent seven-year war, which made Liberia a byword for anarchy and horror and during which Doe was tortured to death in Monrovia.

By the time elections took place under international supervision in July 1997, Taylor had managed to craft the image of a warlord-turned-statesman.

As the country's most powerful figure, he appeared to be the only man capable of stopping the violence, and was duly elected president.

But his rise to power brought little relief to the country.

The almost non-stop wars there are believed to have left some 200 000 people dead, many killed in circumstances of unimaginable cruelty.

Taylor's group formed an offshoot in Sierra Leone, where his ally was the infamous Foday Sankoh, who died last Wednesday. Sankoh headed a mob of barefoot conscripts, child soldiers and army deserters, notorious for hacking off limbs, razing villages and murdering and raping anyone in their path.

Taylor's support of Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front rebels was the basis of his war crimes indictment in early June. – Sapa-AFP.

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