From March 22 until about 9pm on March 24, 200 South African soldiers fought a series of running battles outside Bangui in the Central African Republic (CAR) against 3 000 or more well-armed opponents. And they did so while the CAR Army (Faca) evaporated and the peacekeeping forces of the Central African Standby Brigade disappeared from the scene.

That series of running battles claimed 13 soldiers and 27 others were wounded, but the force retained its cohesion and was able to fall back from two separate engagement areas to its base and to hold it until their attackers gave up trying to overrun them and proposed a ceasefire and disengagement. By then the rebels had suffered as many as 500 casualties, based on estimates by officers with considerable operational experience and estimated by a number of NGOs in the country. In the process the soldiers fired off more than 12 000 rounds of 12.7mm machinegun ammunition, 288 rockets from 107mm rocket launchers and 800 bombs from 81mm mortars, and thousands of rounds from 7.62mm machineguns and 5.56mm rifles.

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