News stories by Rebecca Murray, page 5

Iman Wannouss was just 21 years old when she was married off to a close relative. For the next two decades she gave up her work and raised three children in a loveless and violent marriage.

Leila, 17, presses her hijab-clad head against the front door and strains to hear outside. 'There's nothing,' she says cautiously, turning towards her mother Rawda, the head of the household, in their quiet basement apartment. Along the brocade couch sit her two sisters, Mona, 19, Nadja, 15, and 10-year-old brother Khaled.*

More than a year ago several hundred newly trained Liberian soldiers staged a one-day strike at the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) headquarters.

Nineteen-year-old Beauty Phillips clutches her emaciated baby tightly to her chest. At seven months, Inga suffers from malnutrition.

Monrovia’s highest hill, the long sliver of Atlantic Ocean shoreline at the mouth of the Mesurado River, with its aqua blue waves, golden sand and wooden fishing boats, looks like paradise.

It was past midnight when Carroll Johnson was woken by angry shouting in his suburban neighbourhood of Fiamah. Around the corner a frenzied crowd with sticks had gathered in the darkness, and now stood menacingly over an armed robber called 'Bush Cat'.

Myaha Johnson sits with her family beneath a flimsy shelter of black plastic, looking with despair at the charred remains of what used to be their home. Mary Broh, Monrovia’s controversial mayor-designate, had just swept through the neighbourhood with her task force, vigorously tearing down residential structures along the back road, including their own.

After watching the murder of her husband and his three wives by Charles Taylor’s rebels, Fatu Bonah and her seven children fled into the dense forest to hide. 'The rebels burned down our home and when I returned my in-laws had taken the land,' she says. 'I went to the town chief, who tried to resolve it, but the family refused, saying they had already taken over the land.'

The rain was falling hard in the early hours of April 17, when forty detainees kicked down the doors to their cells at the National Palace of Corrections, scaled the prison’s barbed wire fence and rear watchtower, and disappeared into the dark, sodden jungle.

'We organized security throughout the camp. If there was noise in the plantation we would call the person and carry out an investigation,' the man known as ‘White Flower’ tells IPS. 'Then the superintendent said they should arrest me and my crew.'