With Taylor's forces already pressed against the larger Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), MODEL achieved rapid territorial gains. While it was initially thought that MODEL was a splinter group of LURD, this was not the case. While the initial leadership of MODEL came from LURD, the majority of MODEL fighters were mobilized from Ivorian and Ghanaian refugee camps to which many Liberians from the country's Southeast had fled to.[1]