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She is known as Colonel Black Diamond, and she commands the main rebel movement's "Women's Artillery Commandos." It was this all-women unit that helped spearhead the rebels' push into the heart of the capital city of Monrovia earlier this month. That victory, and the seizure of Liberia's second-largest city by a smaller rebel group, led to the exile of former president Charles Taylor and a peace pact signed this week.

"Women can do something here, and we show they can do it better than men," said Black Diamond, surrounded by fellow gunwomen in this jungle town, a few days after her Monrovia victory. A pistol and a cellular phone hung from her trendy, wide leather belt. Her jeans were embroidered with roses. Her fellow guerrillas were equally fashionable, wearing tight-fitting jeans, leopard-print blouses and an assortment of jewelry. The number of women in her unit, she said, is a military secret. "Men think they can get all over you because they are stronger, but we can fight more," said Black Diamond, who refuses to divulge her real name. Her fellow soldiers murmured in assent.

"We fight better than men because we are disadvantaged," said an aide, Marie Teeah, 27, who sported a red bandana and pink fingernails.

Under the terms of the peace agreement, an interim government will assume control of Liberia in October. Thursday, Gyude Bryant, a businessman who is independent of both rebels and the current administration, was chosen to lead that government. Meanwhile, in the wake of Mr. Taylor's departure, a Nigerian-led force, assisted by more than 100 U.S. Marines, is keeping the fighters apart in Liberia.

It often was pain inflicted by men that brought Black Diamond and her fellow women into the war. Her unit is part of Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, the obscure rebel movement, headed by a Guinea-based used-car salesman, that emerged from the jungle to briefly seize half of Monrovia. Many of the women in Black Diamond's battalion joined the group after suffering from a depressingly common occurrence in West African wars -- rape by soldiers high on alcohol or drugs, who often were HIV-positive.

Black Diamond said she personally had a "bad experience" with soldiers loyal to Mr. Taylor. She added that her mother was killed by his troops during an attack on refugee camps in Guinea. Joining the rebels was a natural way to get back at Mr. Taylor's regime, said Black Diamond.

Male children as young as five have long been recruited into both guerrilla and pro-government militias in Liberia, Sierra Leone and other West African countries. But it is uncommon for women's units to join front-line action. The more common feminine figures on the battlefields are male soldiers in wigs or women's clothes, including wedding gowns. This military cross-dressing frightens some fighters, who believe an evil spirit has overtaken their opponents. Other guerrilla devotees of female dress believe that bullets won't hit them if they've assumed another identity.

The involvement of real women is especially surprising given that the main rebel group, to which Black Diamond belongs, is dominated by the mostly Muslim Mandingo tribe. Still, the group's chief of staff, General Abdullah Sherif, didn't seem to mind the decidedly un-Islamic looks of Black Diamond's troops as he drove around Tubmanburg. Shacks in the headquarters town of the victorious rebels are brimming with supplies they looted just days ago from the Monrovia port.

Fellow guerrillas speak of Black Diamond and her fighters with awe, and even male soldiers around her are quick to follow her orders. She also caught the attention of military men and civilians in Monrovia. "These women have no pity, no sympathy," said Corporal Thompson W. Dahn of Mr. Taylor's Anti-Terrorist Unit militia, who went up against Black Diamond's women earlier this month. "They shoot, they get naked themselves, and they drive me fearful."

Fighters on all sides of the war were known for killing civilians. Black Diamond's unit shelled central Monrovia's Mamba Point neighborhood with mortars, killing hundreds of people, including some who took refuge in the American embassy's residential compound.

"The women were the most wicked," said Bill Kollie, a Monrovia truck driver who has had to deal with both rebel and government checkpoints across the nation. "If women stop you at a checkpoint, you can't beg them like you can do with men. They executed many civilians."

Jacques Klein, the top United Nations official for Liberia, agreed. "Women are always the most fearsome," said Mr. Klein, an American, who is assembling an international peacekeeping force to disarm militias. Sitting in his office just a few hundred yards from where Black Diamond's mortars landed, he dismissed the colonel and her rebel companions as "superstitious people who intimidate the innocent." Then he added half-jokingly: "Women are always to be feared. Have you been to Florida? It is full of women with blue
hair who have killed their husbands."

The Women's Artillery fighters celebrated the cease-fire by firing mortars into the jungle. Taking a break from working on her hairdo, Black Diamond said that her fighters are eager to return to what they were doing before the war. "Some will go back to school, others back to the farm," she said. After leaving Monrovia for the jungle as an 18-year-old, the colonel herself isn't yet sure what civilian life has in store for her. "If Taylor tired of the war, I'm tired," she said. "What will I do? It's gotta be better than it was before."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com1