After years of life under the rule of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in the capital, Damascus, Manal Al Sahwi can finally report as a female journalist using her real name.
Just weeks ago, she risked violence, dishonour and arrest for even the smallest critique of the Assad regime, which has ruled the country with an iron fist for decades. Al Sahwi is now among the many women journalists inside and outside Syria who are cautiously lifting the burden of self-censorship to report on the country’s turbulent transition and uncertain future.
‘Women’s positions in Syria have been ruled by the patriarchal regime that focuses its power in a patriarchal family,’ she says. ‘In such a rule, can we imagine a real space for women?’
Throughout the chaos of the last two weeks, every single individual involved in the decision-making around Syria’s new reality has been a man. Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), the defacto authority which toppled the regime and now claims it will tow a more moderate line during its transitional governance, has made zero effort at female representation. And the scant international reporting on women’s rights in the country characterizes Syrian women as merely the victims of conservativism and religion, when the reality is in fact much more complex.
?New leader, same narrative
The new transitional government spokesperson Obaida Aranaout said in an interview with Aljadeed TV this week that it is too early to discuss women’s participation in the government, noting only that ‘she is going to be taken care of and the tasks assigned to her should fit her physical abilities.’ He went on to add that, ‘women have their special physical and mental nature which fits some tasks, she can’t for example use weapons or be in a position that doesn’t fit her nature.’
This narrative is not new. Syrian women have long-since heard it from men from across the political spectrum — Islamists, conservatives and seculars. But what is new is the response. Simultaneous campaigns were launched on social media, along with sit-ins organised in Homs and Damascus, rejecting Aranaout‘s sexist comments and demanding that he resign. The calls came not only from women, but from many Syrian men and organizations too.
Across the country, women have played a key role in social and political organizing — generally and on women-specific initiatives and humanitarian aid — since the outset of the uprising in 2011. While the radical feminist activities on the country’s Kurdish-governed regions have typically drawn the international spotlight, women’s organizing has featured across Syria’s diverse demographics. For example, Women Now for Development, Syria’s largest women’s rights organization, was launched in 2012 with programs to help Syrian women and girls, displaced and internally, to find their political voices through educational and vocational projects aimed at advancing independence and creating active participants in peacemaking and policy.
‘It’s very worrying that the dominant political scene now in Syria doesn’t have any woman,’ says Zeina Kanawati, who works in communications for Women Now for Development. ‘In the last 14 years, [women] were active on the forefronts of all the fields of struggle against the regime, and they paid double the prices of the war and the militarization.’
Pushing boundaries
HTS has ruled the northeastern city of Edlib, my hometown, since 2015. For years, women here have resisted misogynistic rules such as dress codes that required them to cover their hair and wear long coats, and limits on their ability to move around the city without a male guardian. But since rising to power after the dramatic capture of Aleppo earlier this month, HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa claims he will govern Syria with greater tolerance and social cohesion among minorities. Not everyone is convinced.
‘Women’s rights and participation in the public sphere are often the first casualties of a military coup, regardless of the military’s ideological position,’ says Rim Turkmani, a researcher of the Syrian conflict at the London School of Economics. Turkmani was part of the Women’s Advisory Board which formed in late 2015 in response to the lack of female representation at UN peace negotiations. ‘However, many Syrian women, both those who are actively engaged within civil society and keeping a low public profile, and the others who are outspoken and vocal, are now navigating and testing the new reality with remarkable determination to find their spaces.’
The vast majority of people forcibly disappeared under the Assad regime were men and boys, leaving tens of thousands of women in Syria as the sole breadwinners of their families. According to a UN report from 2023, 92 per cent of female-headed households living in displacement camps scattered across Syria are unable to meet their basic needs for food, water and shelter. Of the 5.9 million people who are in dire need of nutritional assistance, 74 per cent are women and girls. Systematic attacks on healthcare facilities have severely impacted women’s access to reproductive healthcare services, while the UN estimates at least 7.3 million people, mostly women and girls, are in need of sexual and gender-based violence support services.
Last June, Women Now for Development published a report calling for greater collaboration among feminist organizations to achieve peace and democracy in Syria. The report looked at 76 different organizations providing humanitarian support for Syrian refugees and displaced peoples in Turkey and Syria, promoting peace, documenting human rights violations, and supporting a gender-sensitive approach to conflict resolution.
‘We didn’t do all this work to disappear now when our country is finally back to us,’ says Kanawati.
The report specifically mentions the risks of work on sexual and gender-based violence and women’s empowerment in Edlib, where many civil society groups refused to recognize the HTS government. Most international donors will not fund these groups due to restrictions around potential links with HTS, which is listed as a terrorist organization by the UN Security Council and many Western governments.
Still, Syrian women across the country have continued to work on and off the radar to support their communities during and after the 2011 uprising. Ghalia Rahal, a former hairdresser, founded the Mayaza Centre in Edlib in 2013 to offer vocational training and psychological and legal support for women brutalized by the regime. Hundreds of women have since graduated from the centre, and it was here that I gave my first women-only media training. Many of these women were housewives or teachers and are now reporting from their communities for both Syrian and international media. Their role is critical in challenging deeply entrenched power dynamics, shifting perceptions of women’s work and laying the groundwork for gender equality in a post-conflict Syria.
The fall of the regime could mean activists like Rahal are able to work more freely across the country and that more women are able to enrol in political education programs. Forming political parties and expanding social and feminist movements — once an impossible mission — is now a possibility.
There is of course no easy way forward. But all of the women I speak to emphasize the role of women in peace building, despite having been silenced for decades by the Assad regime, Syrian society and the international community. Where it was too dangerous for groups inside Assad-controlled areas to engage with initiatives in other parts of the country, the fall of the regime for the first time represents a unique opportunity for women’s initiatives across Syria to work together.
‘War created an atmosphere that makes it very hard for women to be heard,’ says Hadia Mansour, a journalist in Idlib who still uses a pseudonym for her safety and one of the women I trained in Mazaya centre. ‘The constant crisis and security concerns reduced our ability to take an active role in the decision-making process on the political level and even in the social sphere. I am still not accepted as a woman journalist until now.’
But, Mansour adds, ‘In Idlib we have seen how [women] refused to be sidelined and kept working to help their communities survive the horror they have been living for years.’
For all the jubilance since the fall of Assad, Al Sahwi, the journalist in Damascus, worries that Syria could be moving from a dictatorial regime to an Islamist one. ‘Despite all the reassurances that have been provided so far by HTS, it is too early to be assured that [the transition] will be civic and secular,’ she says.
Turkmani agrees. She says feminist groups could face powerful resistance from HTS, whose rejection of women is a core element of their ideology as an Islamist and military group. ‘The pressure on them [HTS] internally and internationally should continue—not only to hold the space women have already liberated and occupied, but also to expand it. Otherwise, this space will vanish,’ she says.
This article is published in the New Internationalist in December 2024