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West Africa's conflicts are officially over, but rape, brutality and terror continue.

KAILAHUN, SIERRA LEONE -- Greetings from a war zone that's not Iraq. And not Afghanistan either.

I'm checking in from West Africa, where I've been working with women in three neighboring countries, all recently torn apart by civil wars: Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.

Surely you remember these conflicts. Liberia's war came in three successive waves, lasting from 1989 to 2003. Sierra Leone's war started in 1991 when guerrillas of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone, trained in Liberia, invaded their own country. The war drew many players and lasted a decade, until January 2002. In Ivory Coast, the civil war began in 2002 when northern rebels attempted a coup to oust President Laurent Gbagbo; after international intervention, a treaty was signed in 2003.

Today, we've been told, these countries are no longer war zones. Accords have been signed. Peacekeeping forces are on duty or close at hand. The United Nations and international aid agencies are assisting "recovery." Some arms have been surrendered; some refugees have returned from exile.

But although Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast are now officially designated "post-conflict zones," which sounds vaguely hopeful, in reality they are so fractured, so traumatized and, especially in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone, so devastated and impoverished that they cannot be said to be securely at peace. Sierra Leone has replaced Afghanistan as the lowest-ranked country on the United Nations' index of human development, which measures literacy, health and poverty. Like Afghanistan, it is a nation of widows.

Of all those who suffered in the West African wars, it was civilians who suffered the most. Specifically targeted and terrorized as a tactic of war, they were displaced, exiled, abducted, assaulted, tortured, wounded, maimed and killed. And of all the civilians who suffered, none suffered as disproportionately as women. Today, millions of women in these three West African countries are still struggling to recover; for them, the wars aren't really over at all.

To understand why, consider this description from Amnesty International last March of the least of the West African wars, the relatively short civil war in Ivory Coast:

"The scale of rape and sexual violence in [Ivory Coast] in the course of the armed conflict has been largely underestimated. Many women have been gang-raped or have been abducted and reduced to sexual slavery by fighters. Rape has often been accompanied by the beating or torture (including torture of a sexual nature) of the victim. ... All armed factions have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate sexual violence with impunity."

The Amnesty International report documents case after case of girls and women, ages "under 12" to 63, assaulted by armed men. A more recent and thoroughgoing report by Human Rights Watch records the rape of children as young as 3. During the civil war, women and girls were seized in their village homes or at military roadblocks, or were discovered hiding in the bush. Some were raped in public. Some were raped in front of their husbands and children. Some were forced to witness the murder of husbands or parents. Then they were taken away to soldiers' camps, where they were forced to cook for the soldiers during the day and were gang-raped at night, in some cases by 30 or 40 men.

Many women were raped so incessantly and so brutally -- with sticks, knives, gun barrels, burning coals -- that they died. Many others were left with injuries and pain that still linger, long after the war. Many still find it hard to sit down or stand up or walk. Some still spit up blood. Some have lost their eyesight or their memories. Many contracted sexually transmitted diseases and HIV.

Next door in Liberia, by the time fighting ended in 2002, 1.4 million Liberians had been displaced within the country. Almost a million others had fled. In a country of 3 million people, that's one in three citizens gone. At least 270,000 people died. And here again, the easy targets were women. A World Health Organization study in 2005 estimated that a staggering 90% of Liberian women had suffered physical or sexual violence; three out of four had been raped.

On a visit I made to Kolahun, in Lofa County, where fighting had been heavy, one woman showed me her scars: a series of parallel horizontal ridges starting just below one ear and moving down, toward the throat. A guerrilla fighter in the army of Charles Taylor -- the charming, American-educated sociopath who became president of Liberia and is now facing trial for war crimes -- had locked this woman against his chest and slowly, inch by inch, laid open the flesh of her neck in ribbons of blood.

But that wasn't all. Taylor's men had broken all the fingers of her left hand so they now point backward at seemingly impossible angles. They slammed her back so forcefully with rifle butts that one leg and one arm are now paralyzed. She can only walk by leaning on a homemade wooden crutch.

In the tiny village of Dougoumai, I met a woman people refer to only as "the sick lady." As I came into her one-room mud-brick house, she managed to sit up with great difficulty, using her twisted hands to move her swollen, useless legs. Her sister says she was captured by a militia fighting against Taylor and was gang-raped repeatedly by 10 men. Nobody can say how long they kept her. They rammed their gun butts into her back -- evidently a common technique -- paralyzing her legs. They smashed her hands. She cannot hold anything or feed herself or comb her hair.