After being elected in 1997, President Charles Taylor had fortified his power over Liberia, mostly by purging the security forces of opponents, killing opposition figures, and raising new paramilitary units that were loyal only to him or his most trusted officers.

[5] Taylor, who was generally extremely hostile toward Nigeria and resented its influence over West Africa,[9] believed that Johnson's trip indicated that his rival and the Nigerian government plotted to overthrow him.

Thus, when Johnson returned later that month, Benjamin Yeaten's feared Special Security Service (SSS) arrived at Roberts International Airport to apprehend him.

On 18 September 1998 Taylor's followers finally made their move to completely purge the capital of Johnson and his loyalists, though officially they were only supposed to "disarm" them.

[2] The two units, commanded by Yeaten[10] and Charles Taylor's son Chucky respectively,[1] were aiming at completely destroying any opposition and fired at the compound with automatic weapons and RPGs, taking no heed of the civilians that lived at Camp Johnson Road.

[2] The Liberian government fighters then tried to storm the embassy's main gate security screening area, indiscriminately firing their weapons in an attempt to kill the fleeing Johnson.

Two Americans were wounded in the firefight, one Department of State official and one contractor,[3] causing the U.S. guards to respond by returning fire, killing two of the attackers.

[2] After the defeat of Johnson's armed faction, the Liberian security forces went on a killing spree, murdering at least hundreds,[11] possibly even more than one thousand Krahn civilians in Monrovia.

[11] The United States subsequently evacuated half of the embassy's staff, and deployed a small group of Navy SEALs as additional protection force.

[4] The mass killings after the clashes drove hundreds of Krahn to flee the country; some of these exiles, namely ex-ULIMO fighters, eventually began an insurgency against Taylor that would escalate into the Second Liberian Civil War.