They said gunmen, who had taken over the capital after routing pro-government supporters Friday, were being driven out of Beirut's seaside front and other areas. Lebanese soldiers were seen patrolling the streets evacuated by Hezbollah and its allies.

Separately, Lebanese security and hospital officials said that at least 12 gunmen were killed and 20 wounded in a gunbattle between pro- and anti-government groups in a remote region of northern Lebanon.

Saturday's gunbattle occurred in the town of Halba in Akkar, a remote Sunni region in northernmost Lebanon when fighters loyal to Sunni leader Saad Hariri and the government clashed with members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a secular pro Syrian group allied with the Shiite Hezbollah.

The pro-government fighters stormed the office of the SSNP and set it ablaze after the gunbattle.

The number raises to 37 the death toll since Shiite-Sunni sectarian erupted in Beirut on Wednesday and spread to other regions.

Seeking to stop the country's slide toward all-out sectarian strife, the Lebanese army command earlier ordered its troops Saturday to establish security, calling on all parties to withdraw their gunmen and reopen roads while offering the opposition Hezbollah a compromise.

The army statement said the issue of Hezbollah's controversial communications network will be handled by the army's Signal Corps and the airport security chief, whose sacking precipitated the latest crisis, will be reinstated.

The measures are seen as conciliatory to Hezbollah and meets some of their demands.

The chief's removal and the government's decision to declare the communications network illegal sparked days of the worst sectarian clashes in the country since the civil war ended in 1990.

The army statement came after Prime Minister Fuad Saniora called on the army Saturday to restore law and order across Lebanon and remove gunmen from the streets, accusing Hezbollah of staging an armed coup.

Saniora's first comment since fighting erupted Wednesday came as conditions appeared to be mostly calm in Beirut's Muslim sector a day after Shiite gunmen swept through the area. Elsewhere around the country, however, violence appeared to be on the rise.

Some 25 people have died in four days of clashes.

Hezbollah moved Thursday to seize the Sunni neighborhoods of Beirut in a show of force after its leader Hassan Nasrallah accused the U.S. backed government of "declaring war" on his group when it declared the organization's communications network illegal and ordered the removal of the airport security chief.

The army statement said the communications network will be dealt with "in a way that does not harm the national interest and the security of the (Hezbollah) resistance."

The statement also called on the parties "restore things back to where they were ... withdraw the gunmen and reopen the roads."

It ordered the army units "to continue to take measures on the ground to establish security and spread state authority and arrest the violators."

In a Sunni Muslim neighborhood of the capital, a Shiite shopowner opened fire on a funeral procession Beirut, killing two and wounding six, police and witnesses said.

In a mountain town east of Beirut, Hezbollah accuses a pro-government Druse group of kidnapping three of its members and killing two of them. A statement held Druse leader Walid Jumblatt "personally responsible" for the safety of the third man.

In Beirut's western Muslim sector, though, the focus of the fighting, most Hezbollah gunmen had pulled out leaving just small bands of their Shiite Amal allies to patrol the streets.

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