On the morning of March 2, three days into the American-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran, Yanar Mohammed, a 65-year-old women’s rights proponent in Iraq, was gunned down in front of her home in northern Baghdad.
Her killing is still under investigation, but it is almost certain that Ms. Mohammed was killed because of her work. She had spent the better part of the last 20 years campaigning for women’s rights and operating a network of safe houses for women: women fleeing abuse, women fleeing ISIS, women fleeing the many iterations of violence inflicted on them in the wake of America’s invasion of Iraq.
I barely had a moment to reflect on Ms. Mohammed’s death; it was subsumed by the beginnings of yet another war in the Middle East.
As fires burned all over Tehran, after an American 3,000-pound Tomahawk missile obliterated a girls’ school in southern Iran, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, took to the Senate floor to present one photo of Iranian women before the Islamic revolution — in Western clothes, hair uncovered, in miniskirts even — and another of women after 1979: a sea of them covered in veils, in black and white for good measure. “Sadly, under the sick leadership of these terrorists,” Senator Tuberville said, “women are treated like dogs.”
Senator Tuberville is the latest in a long line of American politicians who see bombs as a way of shortening Muslim women’s hemlines. Mike Pompeo and John Bolton — both men who helped shape President Trump’s hawkish policy toward Iran during his first term — often brought up the plight of Iranian women. “The brutal men of the regime seem to be particularly terrified by Iranian women, who are demanding their rights,” Mr. Pompeo, then the secretary of state, said during a Heritage Foundation event in 2018. “The women of Iran deserve the same freedoms that the men of Iran possess.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel — who appears to be the prime mover in the joint bombing campaign on Iran — has repeatedly invoked Iranian women’s rights in his wartime propaganda.
A day after he launched attacks on Iran last June, he addressed the Iranian public in a video: “This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard. Woman, life, freedom,” Mr. Netanyahu said, echoing the slogan of protest movements for women’s rights in Iran. Israeli government accounts have promoted what looks like A.I. propaganda of Iranian women removing their veils with the help of American and Israeli saviors. During the first week of the war, The Jerusalem Post’s front page featured a female Israeli fighter pilot holding hands with a veiled Iranian woman. “Women, Life, Freedom: The Israeli Way,” read the headline.
For its part, the White House has made multiple justifications for its war on Iran, depending on whom you ask and the day you ask: an imminent threat, pre-empting Iranian strikes on American troops, preventing nuclear armament, enabling regime change for a more democratic Iran. The ever-broadening targets of the Israeli and American airstrikes seem to go well beyond the scope of those aims, despite claims to the contrary. Asked about one such strike on a desalination plant, for which the United States has denied responsibility, Mr. Trump said: “They’re among the most evil people ever on earth. They cut babies’ heads off. They chop women in half.”
What’s true of this administration is true of all the others that have overseen attacks on countries in the Middle East. Every time we go to war with a majority-Muslim country, politicians and policymakers roll out the same idea: War, a metaphorical unveiling, will liberate the Muslim woman.
Within this fantasy of American bombing campaigns freeing the oppressed Muslim woman, though, remains the truth: Women in these countries do face repression, sometimes violent repression, and their rights are often violated systematically. I’ve lived and worked as a journalist in many Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, where I’ve witnessed myself how patriarchal attitudes toward women limit how they can dress, where they can go in public, sometimes their basic rights.
These aren’t realities to gloss over. But I’ve also seen the devastating effects of war on women in these countries, devastation that comes in part from the misguided idea that their rights would magically improve as a result of American-led warfare.
The heyday of this thinking came, perhaps, in the months and years after Sept. 11, but even before, the idea that Americans could “unveil” the Muslim woman was already prevalent. Oprah Winfrey, as part of a Madison Square Garden performance of “The Vagina Monologues” in February 2001, walked up to an Afghan woman wearing a burqa onstage, lifted the covering off and revealed her Western dress underneath. The audience applauded.
A documentary called “Beneath the Veil,” filmed and released just weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, was played seemingly on loop on CNN after them. The film, which documented the harrowing conditions of Afghan women during the first Taliban regime, drew in five and a half million viewers and helped fuel a frenzy of concern for Afghan women, a concern that conveniently materialized soon after the Taliban became — at least for a while — America’s No. 1 enemy.
This concern manifested itself in a way that transformed the Muslim veil itself into a totem of repression. Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat who represented one of New York’s fanciest congressional districts, wore a blue burqa on the House floor to deliver a speech justifying the invasion of Afghanistan. “We are at war with the Taliban strictly because they are harboring Osama bin Laden,” she said, but then went on: “The women in Afghanistan who are fighting for freedom should know that they are not fighting in vain. The women in Congress, the women across this country, are standing with them.”
This sentiment has seeped into American foreign policy toward the Middle East on both sides of the aisle. From Laura Bush declaring the war on terror a “fight for the rights and dignity of women” to Hillary Clinton justifying the invasion of Afghanistan as a means of bettering Afghan women’s lives, these statements gave a sheen of morality to wars that have killed close to a million people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan, many of them women and girls.
In Afghanistan, alongside the spectacular violence and the suffering that came with it, there were hard-won gains made during the American occupation. Girls’ primary school enrollment went from almost zero during the first Taliban regime to 2.5 million in 2018. Literacy among women nearly doubled during the nearly 20 years American troops were in the country. Roya Mahboob, an Afghan tech executive who grew up under the first Taliban regime, told me, “For us, it was the golden era.” Ms. Mahboob, who benefited from the NGOs and missions that helped educate Afghan women, said that the contrast with the Taliban regime was night and day: “We had freedom of speech. We had human rights.”
“I mean, there were challenges; I’m not saying everything was perfect,” Ms. Mahboob said. “But it was much better.”
That progress was hardly uniform. Where war raged, women suffered. And by the time the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021, the rights of Afghan women had been erased almost entirely. “It was personal,” said Ms. Mahboob, who has since left Afghanistan. “It felt like watching 20 years of hope collapse in a single day.”
I was hard-pressed to find American politicians as concerned with Afghan women’s rights that summer as they were after Sept. 11, despite the platitudes coming from President Joe Biden and his administration. The United States offered asylum to a limited number of Afghans in the wake of its retreat from the country; millions of Afghan women and girls have been left to try to uphold their rights without any of the institutional backing America and its allies once provided.
Ms. Mahboob says the lesson in Afghanistan is not whether U.S. intervention is better or worse than no intervention at all, but that intervention must come with long-term institution building — exactly the kind of nation building President Trump and his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, forswear. “We were totally relying on the international community,” Ms. Mahboob said. “We took for granted our freedoms.”
The story in Iraq is somewhat different. Saddam Hussein was a secular enemy of the United States rather than an Islamist one, but the focus on the regime’s repression of women was part and parcel of President George W. Bush’s campaign justifying the war. “Every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed,” Mr. Bush said at a White House event in 2004. At the same event, he hailed the war on terror as a liberation of the women of Iraq and Afghanistan, vowing to continue so that they could claim “their rightful place in societies that were once incredibly oppressive and closed.” He did not mention the rape and torture of female prisoners at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison, which began in 2003.
The final decade of Saddam Hussein’s regime ushered in significant backsliding for women. Before the 1991 war, Iraqi women had freedoms that were codified much sooner than many neighboring countries in the Middle East. After it, many of those eroded as Hussein coalesced his power by making alliances with more religious forces in the country.
But what came after the American invasion has undoubtedly damaged the fate of Iraqi women. Ms. Mohammed, the Iraqi activist, described post-occupation Iraq in an interview on the American news program “Democracy Now” in 2003: “The story that does not reach this part of the world is how the women are treated in postwar Iraq, what happened to us, how our destinies were totally devastated by this war,” she said. “What is told to everybody is that we got rid of a bloody dictator, which is a true story. But the part that nobody knows is that we did have sort of a secure life.”
“The steps backward cannot be counted,” Ms. Mohammed told The Times in a 2015 interview. “There were too many.” Ms. Mohammed is one of many Iraqi women who have been killed in recent years, some of whom worked not as women’s rights’ advocates, but as influencers and salon owners. What they had in common was that they dared to be a part of public life.
War is bad for all living creatures, but it is especially bad for women. According to Oxfam, one in five women displaced by war suffer sexual violence. In wartime, their education is the first to stop. More than 60 percent of preventable maternal deaths happen to women living through displacement and conflict.
Yet we find ourselves, more than 20 years from the start of the war on terror, once again falling prey to the idea that bombing can liberate women in still another majority-Muslim country. The belief remains persistent because of deep-rooted misconceptions of Muslims: Western feminism is unable to square that women who wear the veil could be empowered and have rights, but it’s also that the Western imagination — or Western policymakers anyway — is incapable of recognizing the depth and variety of Muslim life.
In my years reporting and living in majority-Muslim countries, some of the most vocal women I encountered wore the veil. Often, a veil is what allows them to be in a public position in the first place, the midway point for societies in the midst of social change. And some of the most secular Muslim women I know — myself included — fiercely defend their right to wear one. It’s not just an on-off switch; there are so many ways to be a Muslim woman. But these imagined ideas of what freedom for a Muslim woman must look like ignore that reality.
This mapping of Western stereotypes onto how Muslim women do or don’t dress won’t go away any time soon, but in moments when it’s used to justify the frightening might of the American military and its allies, it becomes particularly dangerous.
That’s why this moment in Iran feels so pressing. The enforcement of public veiling was one of the strongest symbols of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s grip on the country. It’s part of the reason that the tired meme trotted out by Senator Tuberville — look at Iranian women before the revolution! — remains relevant. I visited Iran in 2015 to film a documentary shortly after President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal was put in place. It was an optimistic time in the country, one that’s heartbreaking to look back on now. I still remember my veil slipping in the streets of Tehran and someone rushing to alert me, not out of anger that my head was uncovered, but concern for the trouble I could face from the religious police.
That reality has changed. After Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman who was accused of wearing her mandatory hijab improperly, died after being taken into custody by morality police, the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement in 2022-23 brought hard-fought material changes to the lives of Iranian women. The streets of Iranian cities filled with women who didn’t cover their hair, arguably the most tangible and pervasive challenge to the Islamic Republic’s regime in its 47-year history. It came at the costs of hundreds of protesters killed and countless more arrested and tortured in Iranian prisons. But it’s a change Iranian women made themselves, from within Iran.
There are two images from the peak of those protests that stick in my mind: One is of a woman standing on a car, burning her hijab at the end of a stick; another is of a group of schoolgirls with their veils off, faces turned away from the camera, lifting up their middle fingers to the photos of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, hanging in their classrooms. They stay with me because they depict Iranian women taking their fate into their own hands. They didn’t need Oprah or an Israeli fighter pilot to remove their veils for them.
Co-opting their arduous struggles in support of a campaign of bombing that has already killed more than 1,300 Iranians flies in the face of what women’s liberation actually looks like. Freedom for Muslim women is fought the way it is for women everywhere: in moments of immense societal upheaval, but also in the every day, in the small, slow interactions that add up to progress the world over. There’s nothing about war that supports that kind of change.
As the bombs continue to fall, the words of Ms. Mohammed, the Iraqi activist — and her fate — haunt me: “The first losers in all of this,” she once said, “were women.”
Meher Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.
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