Women Are Syria’s Best Hope for Lasting Peace. Will They Be Heard?

When the Assad regime fell in Syria on Dec. 8, 2024, Hind Kabawat, a Syrian activist and conflict resolution professor, didn’t miss a beat. A former student of hers who lives in northern Syria rushed to Kabawat’s home in southern Turkey, picked her up, and drove her to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. 

Kabawat traveled through abandoned checkpoints and destroyed city blocks to reunite with colleagues including a judge, civil society leaders, and the head of a camp for displaced people. Some hailed from Aleppo; some from other parts of Syria. Some had stayed put during the war, others, like Kabawat, were returning home from exile for the first time since the war started in 2011. 

The Syrian civil war began after Syrians organized pro-democracy protests. President Assad cracked down on protestors mercilessly, and as he did, the Free Syria Army and other rebel groups formed to challenge him. Assad bombed huge swaths of the country in an attempt to quash the uprising, using barrel bombs and sarin gas against his people and ultimately driving over 12 million Syrians from their homes. 

For years, Kabawat has been focused on promoting democracy and gender equity through interfaith and interethnic dialogue. She is a Christian from Damascus, where she used to host salons, bringing together journalists, artists, academics as well as people from diverse backgrounds and political affiliations. In 2015, she founded Tastakel, a women-led nonprofit focused on rebuilding a democratic society in Syria. 

Then in 2017, Kabawat co-founded the Syrian Women’s Political Movement (SWPM), a group that advocates for women’s participation in all aspects of decision-making. The organization has since grown to over 200 Syrian members who have been living in at least 21 countries.

The SWPM is a powerful force in almost every opposition political and civil society organization working for freedom and justice in Syria. Over the past seven years, its members have documented human rights abuses, advanced refugee camps and humanitarian aid efforts, negotiated ceasefires and detainee releases, and supported communities and children. 

With Assad’s departure and a caretaker government in place, members of SWPM are rallying urgently. They have deep concerns about the new government’s commitment to human rights and women’s participation. Their advocacy is particularly important given the threat of foreign influence in Syria from Turkey as well as past and recent human rights abuses against Syrian Kurds. In short, their voices simply must be heard. 

Kabawat has been preparing for this moment for years; leveraging her network and recruiting Syrians from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds to join her trainings on the principles and practice of conflict resolution and mediation in the Syrian context. This is not an anomaly: It is often feminist political and peace-building groups that invest in the long, hard work of community building across sectarian divides, which explains women’s high success rate when it comes to seeding and maintaining peace. 

Now Kabawat’s network of peacebuilders is large. “So if we are going to speak about national dialogue, we’re ready,” she told me.

From the Sidelines to the Center 

Until 2016, Syrian women were largely sidelined from formal negotiations. “In 2012, women were being asked just solely to testify about rape and torture and detention in a horrifically retraumatizing manner,” one State Department official (who was not permitted to use their name) told me. 

Now, “some of those same activists are literally in charge of the constitutional committee for the opposition,” she said. 

A major leap forward came in 2016 with the formation of the Women’s Advisory Board (WAB) to the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, tasked with facilitating a Syrian-led political process for peace and stability. The WAB regularly advised the Special Envoy and reviewed policy positions with a focus on women’s needs and perspectives, but its emphasis was on advising the UN, not directly participating in political organizations or negotiations. The following year (2017), the SWPM was founded to support women’s direct participation. 

Syrian women drove stunning advances through the WAB and the SWPM, as well as other organizations. In 2019, group members—women—began testifying regularly about the fate of missing persons and detainees and many other human rights issues at the UN Security Council, which was previously unheard of. Women now hold formal leadership roles in official negotiating committees. And women were instrumental in the 2023 formation of the UN Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria.

But the gains have come at a serious cost to women’s safety and security. 

“I have seen the text messages that these women get when they’re [at negotiations]. They are very specific, targeted violent threats to them and their families that are inside Syria,” said the State Department official. The threats may come from regime supporters, or they may come from people who don’t want to see women in positions of power. 

Questions Around Syria’s New Leadership

It is too soon to know the extent to which Syria’s transitional—and eventual official—government will respect human rights and women’s leadership. 

When, on Dec. 8, the Syrian rebel coalition, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—known as HTS— stormed Damascus and toppled President Bashar al-Assad, HTS immediately formed a transitional government. Among its promises: A new constitution, eventual elections, and an inclusive new Syria. They said women’s rights will be respected, including women’s right to education, and that dress codes would not be imposed.

It sounds good in theory, but history gives cause for concern. HTS was originally the Al-Nusra Front—the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. The current HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, under his nom de guerre, Mohammed al-Jolani, founded Al-Nusra in 2011. He has since disavowed his extremist roots and says he has reformed HTS to follow more moderate governance practices. But the U.S. government continues to classify HTS as a terrorist organization.

As for HTS’s human rights record, it’s a source of serious concern. It has a record of discrimination and civil society interference in Idlib, a northwestern province in Syria. On the other hand, HTS permitted a church and a women’s center to continue activities there, said Kabawat. HTS didn’t support it, but they didn’t oppose it, either, she explained. 

Strategic Negotiations

All of this means that Syrian women like Kabawat have their work cut out for them. They need to be on their guard. Still, they are expert negotiators, and they know their value.

“The current leadership of the interim authorities want the credibility of the Syrian women because they know the power that will bring,” said the State Department official, based on reports from Syrian women. They “are not going to give that [to HTS] for nothing.”

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, a group of U.S. representatives are making noise on behalf of the Syrian women. In 2020, U.S. Representatives in the House formed a Women, Peace and Security Caucus. The Caucus communicates with the State Department to push for women to be on the U.S. government’s agenda for Syria as well as in other contexts. U.S. officials are talking on a “daily, sometimes hourly, sometimes multiple times an hour basis” with the SWPM and other women leaders in Syria, according to the State Department official.

Why Syria Needs Women

Syria's chances for a stable transition will be much higher if women are involved. 

Research has shown time and again that peace agreements are more likely to hold in the long term when women are at the table. 

One of the reasons women are so effective as peace negotiators is because of their understanding of the costs of war. Women bear war in different ways than men. Women and children comprised over two-thirds of the Syrians displaced by the war. It was Syrian women refugees who had to figure out how to make ends meet. Many took to sewing or cooking to survive, but 92% of them couldn't meet their family’s basic needs. Women became particularly vulnerable to sexual violence, child marriage, and trafficking. It is women who see the hardship, survival, and recovery up close. 

Women turn marginalization into an advantage in peace-building. Women, like the leaders of the SWPM, know what it is like to be excluded from power in a patriarchal society. They share a common experience across religious, ethnic, and political divides that provides the basis for relationships that can be activated, despite differences, for peace-building. 

At the Forefront

In times of political upheaval, news coverage narrows, and we miss important stories, like those of women leaders on the ground. But Mariam Jalabi, another co-founder of SWPM, urges people to look beyond the camera frame.

Women may not be front and center in media coverage, but they are working tirelessly without much fanfare. You’ll find them organizing for peace if you only know to look. “In all of what's happening inside, in the background, and everywhere…Women are at the forefront,” Jalabi told me. 

This week, Jalabi will travel to Damascus to meet with around 30 members of the Syrian Women’s Political Movement. They will hold a press conference in Damascus on Jan. 8 to present their political vision and reunite members who have been in hiding and in exile. “One of the things we figured out is that it's not us asking, it's us acting,” said Jalabi. 

Kabawat will join her, along with another co-founder Joumana Seif whose work dates back to long before the 2011 protests that started the Syrian revolution. “I can assure you that most of the demonstrations, especially at the beginning, were organized by women… by us,” Seif said. 

And so the tradition continues.