National Patriotic Front of Liberia

The National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) was a rebel group that initiated and participated in the First Liberian Civil War from 1989 to 1996.

The military aspects of NPFL was led by Charles Taylor, a former government official who was being sought for trial on charges of corruption, the NPFL took up arms against the regime of Samuel Doe on 24 December 1989. Most NPFL fighters were originally drawn from the Gio and Mano ethnic groups of northern Liberia who were persecuted under Doe's regime.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf served as International Coordinator of the NPFL. Taylor and Tom Woewiyu were also in leadership positions.

Taylor's NPFL enjoyed the active backing of Libya, Côte d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso, especially in the early years of the war. Popular support within Liberia helped the group grow from an initial force numbering in the low hundreds to a large irregular army which occupied around 80 percent of the country in less than a year.

NPFL efforts to capture the capital city of Monrovia were thwarted by the arrival of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) cease-fire monitoring group, ECOMOG. They instead set up in 1991 an alternative national administration (the National Patriotic Reconstruction Assembly Government - NPRAG) based in the Bong County town of Gbarnga. Taylor's authority as self-proclaimed head of the NPRAG was, however, challenged by a breakaway faction, known as the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL), led by Prince Yormie Johnson, whose troops, estimated to number less than 500, rapidly gained control of parts of central Monrovia.

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