MONROVIA, Liberia ? Pushed by the United States, West Africa’s leaders broke a deadlock Thursday and announced the first troops of a long-promised peace force would be deployed to Liberia’s bloodied capital within days. Tens of thousands of Liberians spilled into Monrovia’s streets, celebrating the arrival of an advance military team.

Flashing peace signs, waving handkerchiefs and shouting in joy, residents and refugees came out of hiding places to welcome the 10-member team, which included one U.S. representative — the first sign of a desperately hoped-for rescue.

“We are hungry, but seeing these people, we are full,” declared businessman Mohammed Dauda, 31, as the West African and U.S. team rolled through streets littered with bullet casings and unexploded shells. “We hope this marks the beginning of the end.”

“We want peace!” crowds chanted, thronging streets in front of the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy.

In Accra, Ghana, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and other West African leaders pledged Thursday to deploy the first peace forces by Monday and to get embattled President Charles Taylor out of the country three days later. The announcement came after weeks of promises to intervene, repeatedly stalled by deliberations about funding and broken cease-fires in Monrovia.

Bloodletting in more than two months of rebel sieges has killed more than 1,000 civilians in the capital, an Atlantic Ocean-side city of 1 million choked with thousands of refugees.

With the port and the city’s water plant cut off by fighting, hunger, thirst and epidemics of cholera are rife in Monrovia, hit nearly night and day by mortars, rockets and gunfire.

Nigeria, West Africa’s military power, was expected to provide two battalions with a total of roughly 1,500 men, serving as a vanguard of what regional leaders say should be a 5,000-strong foreign force.

The first battalion would arrive Monday, peeling off from a U.N. deployment in neighboring Sierra Leone, said Col. Theophilus Tawiah, the future force’s chief of staff.

“The first task” of the vanguard force would be to see that Taylor leaves, according to a statement from the leaders.

Taylor, indicted by a U.N.-backed war crimes court for supporting rebels in Sierra Leone and blamed for 14 years of conflict in Liberia, is to hand over power to a successor within three days of the troops’ arrival.

Monrovians cheer an advance military team as it passes through the streets near the U.S. Embassy in the Liberian capital of Monrovia. West African leaders broke a deadlock Thursday and announced the first troops of a peace force would be deployed to Liberia's bloodied capital within days. The 10-member advance military team arrived Thursday.