Summary
Women across conflict zones and authoritarian systems endure violence, imprisonment, exploitation, and systemic silencing. Extremist ideologies and oppressive structures control women’s bodies, voices, and futures, often embedding hatred within education and family systems. Economic dependence and weak legal protections further trap many in cycles of abuse. Yet even in the face of danger, women continue to resist and assert their power to transform society.
Key Takeaways
- Women disproportionately suffer from wars, extremism, and oppressive ideologies they did not create, often facing violence, silencing, and systemic control.
- Extremist beliefs and hatred are sustained through institutions such as education, homes, and social systems, making the crisis generational and deeply rooted.
- Despite repression and violence, women continue to resist, rebuild, and challenge systems of control, demonstrating resilience that can reshape the future.
As I write these words, I feel the weight of countless stories pressing on me, and I realize that no hat I put on can fully contain them. These titles — journalist, activist, analyst — mean nothing when I sit alone in my room, knowing what is happening around me. I will not write this as a woman from Bahrain, from the Gulf, from the Arab world, or from the Middle East.
I write this simply as a woman — once just a girl — who once looked at life with innocence and simplicity. Life felt lighter then. But as I grew older, I saw the ugliness. I saw how much women pay for wars they did not start, ideologies they did not design, and extremism they did not create.
As we mark International Women’s Day, let us be honest: we are marking, not celebrating.
The Ayatollah regime — a terrorist system that polices women’s bodies and silences their voices — arrested women, beat them, and dragged them into prison cells for refusing submission. Women have been assaulted in detention centers. Young girls have been shot in the streets. Mothers have watched daughters disappear for removing a headscarf. Executions happen quietly. Families are warned not to speak.
This same regime funded Hizbullah, supports the Houthis, and spreads ideologies that destabilize the region. How can any woman feel safe knowing such a system remains powerful?
I remember the video of a TV director in Afghanistan, her voice trembling as she filmed the Taliban entering Kabul. “Please save us,” she pleaded. That cry echoed worldwide, yet Afghan women were erased almost overnight. Girls were sent home from schools. Universities were closed to them. Women journalists vanished from television screens. Women were told their voices were dangerous, their faces forbidden, their existence conditional.
I remember a woman I met in Baghdad airport. She was Yazidi. She held her daughter tightly while UN workers helped her leave Iraq. She told me how ISIS terrorists sold her, bought her, passed her from one man to another as if she were property. Her price was less than fifty dollars. Her eyes carried exhaustion, but also determination. She said she was leaving so her daughter would never face the same fate she faced. She feared extremism would never be eliminated. That image of her walking through Baghdad airport, holding her child and walking toward uncertainty, has never left me. We owe women like her more than sympathy. We owe them justice. We owe them change.
I remember the footage from the Nova Festival in Israel. Young women dancing, laughing, alive, then terror. Then chaos. Women dragged into trucks, used as instruments of fear. I remember the young Israeli soldier, a Hamas militant pointing a gun at her head while another said, “This one is pretty.” In that moment, she was not seen as a human being, only as vulnerable. Terror strips women of dignity first.
I think of so-called honor killings, a woman murdered because she chose autonomy, because she sat in a café with a man, because she refused silence. There is no honor in murder. Only fear disguised as culture.
And then I see women proudly declaring themselves wives of ISIS terrorists, saying they are willing to die for their husbands and their cause. I look at them and I ask: who shaped this thinking? Which home? Which school? Which ideology convinced them that death is greater than life? These women raise children. If extremism lives in their minds, it will live in the next generation. What future are we allowing if these ideologies are not dismantled from their roots?
When women in classrooms in Gaza teach children that those on the other side of the border are enemies who must die, we must confront a painful truth: the problem is deeper than politics. It lives in education. It lives in homes. When hatred is planted in classrooms and reinforced at kitchen tables, societies fracture from within. This is when we know the crisis is generational. Education must build humanity, not hostility.
As I write this, somewhere in our region a woman is being attacked simply for expressing her opinion. She is bullied, threatened, humiliated. The first weapon used against her is her dignity. When voices are silenced by execution in one place and by harassment in another, we cannot say women are safe.
And then there is the woman inside her own home: economically trapped, emotionally exhausted, believing survival requires silence. When financial dependence forces endurance of abuse, freedom becomes theoretical.
Women are not weak. But without strong laws, real enforcement, and reform that uproots extremism from its core, in schools, in sermons, in homes, women remain exposed. Those who spread terror understand something clearly: control women, and you control the future.
But they underestimate women.
I have seen Iranian women resist despite danger. Afghan girls studying in secret. Yazidi survivors rebuilding their lives. Mothers teaching compassion in environments filled with hate. Women speaking when silence would be safer.
So today, we do not celebrate lightly.
We mark this day with awareness. With anger. With resolve.
Because despite violence, despite humiliation, despite systems built to silence them, women in the Middle East continue to rise.
And when women rise, they do not only survive.
They reshape the future.
