The sisters-in-arms of Liberia's war

Black Diamond could be the prototype for an action hero, a sort of African "Lara Croft." She's all sleek muscle and form-fitting clothes, with an AK-47 and red beret.

She has a bevy of supporting beauties, equally stylish, who loiter nearby, polished fingernails clutching the cold steel of semi-automatic weapons.

But this is no video game or action flick; it is one of Africa's most intransigent and brutal conflicts, where child soldiers brag about killing the "dogs" on the other side, and ragtag militias rape and pillage their way across the countryside.

In other African conflicts, like Uganda and Congo, women have participated in rebel movements, but usually in supporting roles. They cook, clean, and often sleep with soldiers - not always by choice. But here in Liberia, often out of revenge for husbands slain at the hands of the enemy, women have fought on the front line as part of an elite and feared unit unique on the continent.

Now as a new peace deal tries to take hold here, women like Black Diamond and her troops face the prospect of rejoining society after years of combat.

Black Diamond's girls are mostly orphans who found their way to this rebel army because they had nowhere else to go. And Black Diamond herself, the nom de guerre of Liberia's highest-ranking women rebel, is a fearsome commander known for handcuffing wayward soldiers - male and female - to an air conditioning grate and beating them with a rubber hose.

Diamond leads a whole unit of fighting women, called, depending on who is asked, the Women's Auxiliary Corps or the Women's Artillery Commandos. According to Diamond's deputy, Marie Teah, a short-haired woman with crude tattoos of poisonous animals running up both arms, there are 600 women fighting for the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), most of them children, although that figure is probably exaggerated.

Two weeks ago, LURD withdrew from Monrovia and handed over their part of the city to West African peacekeepers as part of a new peace deal. Last week, Gyude Bryant, an independent businessman, was chosen to take control of an interim government in October, paving the way for elections to be held within two years. Still, there were unconfirmed reports Monday that fighting continues in the diamond-rich northeast part of the country.

Since major combat ended, some of the girls have left to find their families, but most, like their male counterparts, have nowhere to go.

"I want to go to school and become a nurse," says 16-year-old Capt. Gertrude Gabolee, a round-faced girl with long yellow braids who claims she killed "plenty" of people during her two years on the front line. "But I have no family to help me."

At the back of an abandoned lumberyard filled with wood scraps and old machinery stands a looted building that once served as a command center for Black Diamond and her women. A pair of handcuffs still hangs from the air conditioning grate and the graffiti on one wall still reads: "No stupid men allow."

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