Daniel Cooney, Jakarta – Christians and Muslims waged fierce street battles in the Maluku islands, leaving at least 11 people dead, hospital officials said Sunday.

One of those killed was a pregnant mother sheltering inside her house when a mortar round crashed through the window of her home and exploded Saturday, said Risad, an official from the Protestant Church Hospital in the region's main city of Ambon.

He said four Christians and seven Muslims were killed, and hundreds of houses and a church were burned in fighting that continued through Saturday night and into Sunday.

Risad said that despite the declaration of a state of emergency in the region, the military were incapable of stopping the violence. "Please tell the United Nations to help us," he said in a phone interview from Ambon. "They are the only ones who can stop this."

Risad, who like many Indonesians only uses one name, accused certain sections of the armed forces of taking sides in the conflict. He said many of the Muslim militants were carrying army-issue assault rifles and other weapons.

Another hospital worker, Paing Suryaman, said gunfire continued to echo across the war-ravaged town on Sunday. He said the security forces had deployed hundreds of heavily armed police officers and soldiers to the most violent areas in the town to try to quell the violence.

Nearly 4,000 people have died in 18 months of intercommunal violence in the Malukus. The religious fighting has already spread to Sulawesi island and there are fears that it could expand to other areas of this vast archipelagic nation.

Senior government officials in Jakarta have recently accused supporters of Indonesia's former dictator Suharto of inciting fighting in the Malukus in an attempt to destabilize President Abdurrahman Wahid's eight-month-old government.

In an interview with The Jakarta Post newspaper on Saturday, Indonesia's Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono accused Muslim militants of stoking the sectarian war in Indonesia's Maluku islands, saying that 10,000 paramilitaries had infiltrated the province in the past three months.

He was referring to an armed Muslim militia whose leaders have vowed to rid the islands of Christians. Most members come from Indonesia's central island of Java and its leaders are supporters of former dictator Suharto.