We saw the mob was also armed with iron bars, machetes, rocks, knives, wood and they were yelling, ‘no more RDR, no more Dioulas, we’ve come to kill you, it’s time to finish with the Muslims.’ Some of them said they’d heard a church had been burned. We could see they had cans of petrol. When we realized things were getting out of control, we called the police from the 17th precinct to help protect us and the mosque. When the police entered, they told us they were going to take us out of there. By this time the mob was starting to break down the gate. As we got into their cars they assured us they’d protect our mosque. This was around 11:45 a.m. As we left we could see the attackers were FPI militants; they were putting up the ‘V’ sign the FPI uses. It was when the police put up the same ‘V’ sign as they were taking us out that we first suspected something was wrong. Then it got worse. We knew something was really wrong when on our way going, the police started saying, ‘you aren’t true citizens of this country, you’re going to be sent back to where you came from and if you don’t understand that, we’ll wake you up one by one when you’re on top of your women and kill you.’ When we arrived at the 17th police precinct they put us inside a closed room then the next morning they told us to write all our names down and explained we were to be sent to the Police Academy. When we asked what our crime was, they explained that we were holding RDR meetings in the mosque. They asked us what we were doing in the mosque so early in the morning and accused us of organizing ourselves to go out and burn churches. At around the same time on October 26, 2000, a mob of FPI militants and a small patrol of police attacked and threatened to burn down a mosque in Treichville. A twenty-five-year-old mosque-goer, who was shot in the arm by the police during the attack, described what happened.37 I was at home with my sister when at around l0:00 a.m. we received a call from our imam saying people had started attacking mosques and that a mob wanted to burn our own. He told us to prepare ourselves to come and protect our mosque. We quickly went to the mosque, picked up some stones and waited to see what would happen. We were about forty men and women. Then we saw a group of about twenty FPI militants coming towards the mosque. Many of the FPI people I recognized because they were from my neighborhood. In back of the mob I saw a police patrol car with four policemen walking outside of it. I even knew some of the police. The pickup had ‘2nd District’ written on it. The FPI people had wood, machetes and a few had bottles of petrol. Then the mob started throwing rocks and the police threw tear gas at us. The FPI were saying they were going to burn the mosque and kill the Dioula. They said we should go away from Côte d’Ivoire and that they were going to catch all foreigners, especially the Burkinabés. We threw a lot of rocks at them. The FPI people then retreated a bit and let the police come in front from where they threw more tear gas at us. When one of the police officers closest to where I was stopped to change his clip, I ran for it, but was shot in the arm. The fighting lasted for about fifteen minutes before they gave up and left. A forty-year-old Dioula driver described how he was rounded up from his neighborhood with other Dioula men before being taken to the National Police Academy:38 37 38 Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, November 4, 2000. Human Rights Watch interview, Abidjan, November 6, 2000. Human Rights Watch 22 August 2001, Vol. 13, No. 6(A)