ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast ? A 5,000-strong stone-throwing mob invaded Ivory Coast’s main airport Friday, storming planes on the tarmac and taunting, slapping and spitting at terrorized French families in flight from their former West African colony.

“Never come back!” one band of young men shouted, spewing profanities at a woman and three children who ran sobbing under a gauntlet of blows from parking lot to terminal.

French forces in cannon-mounted armored vehicles took up positions in and around the runway, backed by helicopters clattering overhead. At one point the French briefly squared off against Ivory Coast forces — rifles locked, loaded and aimed.

Two French soldiers were injured, one seriously, by rocks thrown by protesters, said a French military spokesman, Lt. Col. Philippe Perret.

A French soldier looks out from an armored vehicle as local residents protest at the airport in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Heavily armed French troops in armored vehicles and helicopters were deployed in force Friday at Ivory Coast's airport, guarding fleeing French citizens from thousands of rock-throwing demonstrators. Protesters were angry about a peace deal signed Jan. 24 in Paris that they say yields too much to Ivory Coast's rebels.

France has 2,500 troops in Ivory Coast to protect more than 16,000 French civilians.

The day was one of the most eventful in a week of often-violent protests over a French-brokered deal to end Ivory Coast’s 4-month-old civil war. Government loyalists — including the protesters at the airport — say the deal gives too much to rebels who control half the country.

The Jan. 24 peace deal puts rebels and the government into a power-sharing administration until 2005 elections. Loyalists have objected most strongly to unconfirmed rebel claims that the deal gives them control of Ivory Coast’s military and paramilitary.