Decorative Inclusion: How Syria’s Transition Is Undercutting Women

After the 2011 uprising-cum-civil war, that landscape changed significantly. As state authority fractured in much of the country, women’s organizing expanded through humanitarian networks, documentation initiatives tracking the regime’s and the war’s impact on women, local councils, and diaspora-led advocacy. Much of this work remained informal or clandestine, particularly in regime-held areas, but it generated political and civic experience among women at a scale not seen before. This involved women inside the country and in the diaspora building pan-Syrian and transnational coalitions around constitutional reform, transitional justice, humanitarian response, and local governance. Interviewees repeatedly emphasized that the war years, despite immense violence, allowed many women to gain leadership experience through these networks and fostered expectations that they could eventually shape Syria’s political future.

By the mid-2010s, international engagement reinforced these expectations. Processes linked to United Nations Security Council resolution 2254 in 2015, laying out a blueprint for peace in Syria, and mechanisms such as the Syrian Women’s Advisory Board (WAB), another UN body formed in 2016, formalized the idea that women should have a role in political negotiations. These structures, however, remained largely consultative and lacked authority, offering women cosmetic participation. A quintessential example was the 2019 peace talks in Geneva, where WAB members were literally forced to wait in the hotel lobby as representatives from numerous groups, including religious radicals, armed opposition militias, and the Assad regime, were in the boardroom attempting to negotiate an end to the conflict. As such, women were present but depoliticized, with a marked gap between their ostensible participation in, and meaningful influence over, policy decisions. As one activist described it, these mechanisms and symbolic processes felt like “just a piece you hang on the wall.”

The Kurdish Exception

The Kurdish-administered areas in northeastern Syria emerged during the civil war as an exception to the rest of the country regarding women’s inclusion. This was due to the Kurdish-led authorities’ explicit adoption of Jineoloji, a Kurdish feminist framework that places women’s liberation at the center of the wider struggle against oppression.

Through 2012 and 2013, as Kurdish-led authorities consolidated control following the withdrawal of regime forces, new governance structures emerged that explicitly incorporated women into political and administrative systems. Under what became the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), mechanisms such as co-chair systems, mandatory gender parity, women’s councils, and autonomous women’s institutions became formal components of governance. Women participated directly in local councils, legal reform, administrative governance, and constitutional discussions. Among the policies they helped draft were the region’s 2014 Women’s Law, aimed at securing gender parity and dismantling patriarchal structures, as well as family law reforms, and constitutional visions for Syria’s future. Women also comprised roughly 50 percent of both the expanded and core drafting committees involved in developing DAANES’s official Social Contract, released in 2023.

The development of women’s military structures was also central. The Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), established in 2013, became internationally recognized for their military role against ISIS and as symbols of women’s political participation and autonomy within Kurdish governance. For many interviewees, the YPJ’s significance extends beyond security: it represents a model in which women exercised authority publicly and institutionally.

While interviewees acknowledged limitations and internal tensions within Kurdish-administered areas, they consistently described them as one of the few places in Syria where women’s political participation became baked into the structure of governance rather than being an afterthought to it.

Inclusion without Influence  

In December 2024, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus as fighters affiliated with the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) bore down on the capital, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate who had more recently renounced transnational jihadism. In the weeks that followed, as al-Sharaa and HTS leaders began cobbling together a transition government, interviewees described a period filled with a cautious yet undeniable optimism that their years of networking, sacrifice, and organization-building might finally translate into women’s meaningful participation in a post-Assad order.

Today, however, those expectations have largely collapsed, with interviewees describing an ecosystem of exclusion operating on two levels. The official level consists of acts the government has taken: appointments, directives, prosecutions, and the structure of the new parliamentary order. Unofficially, there are pressures the government has not formally endorsed but has not constrained: socially enforced dress codes, preaching campaigns by aligned networks, and a security apparatus that selectively investigates violence against women. Together they produce an environment in which women’s participation risks being foreclosed without anyone having to declare it forbidden.

Among the dynamics carried over from the previous regime is the token representation of women, using their presence as evidence of progress while limiting the scope of their influence. Interviewees describe this as creating a “decorative” role for women.

The most visible example sits at the Syrian cabinet table. Hind Kabawat, a Christian academic and longtime opposition figure, was appointed Minister of Social Affairs and Labor in March 2025, the sole woman in a 23-member cabinet. In an interview with BBC, she said on her first day on the job she asked al-Sharaa why there were not more women, to which he promised more were coming. A year and a half later, she remains the only one. A cabinet shuffle on May 9 this year replaced four ministers and four governors, adding no women and removing the only Druze minister. The most powerful portfolios (interior, foreign affairs, justice, defense) remain held by men from al-Sharaa’s HTS inner circle. Whatever Kabawat’s individual credibility, one woman in a non-sovereign ministry is easy to point to as evidence of inclusion without having to alter the distribution of power.

This decorative dynamic was repeated at Syria’s central bank, where Maysaa Sabrine was appointed governor in late December 2024, the first woman to lead a central bank in the Arab world, only for her to resign three months later. The parliament tells the same story at the legislative level. Of the 119 seats filled in the October 5, 2025 indirect elections, six were won by women, a share lower than under the Assad regime. Importantly, only 6,000 votes were counted through an electoral college process, with the electors appointed by a committee process overseen by Al-Sharaa.

Among the few other prominent government women appointees, there has been a notable effort to narrow, rather than expand, social and political inclusion for other women. For instance, Aisha al-Dibs, head of a newly created Women’s Affairs Office, gave an interview saying she would build a model for Syrian women rooted in Islamic Sharia, that women’s primary responsibilities were to their “families and husbands”, and that she would “not allow space for those who differ with me ideologically.”

Civil Society Constriction

The fall of Assad led many Syrian civil society actors abroad to return to Syria, while others who had been working clandestinely in the country came out of hiding. Public forums emerged for discussing Syria’s future, and many activists worked to formalize previously informal networks. In late December 2024, 44 Syrian civil society organizations submited a memorandum calling for an inclusive and democratic transition in Syria.

However, a key theme among interviewees was that this new visibility itself became a source of vulnerability. After the regime’s fall, activist networks became more public, more centralized, and more accessible to the authorities, which subsequently began enforcing tighter administrative oversight, provisional licensing systems, event approvals, scrutiny of speakers and programming, and creating uncertainty about what civic activity would ultimately be tolerated.

Across interviews, feminist activists described an unofficial policy where institutional restrictions are rarely codified yet consistently felt and enforced. One of the most cited mechanisms is selective permission. Licenses for events, organizations, and platforms are inconsistently approved, often delayed or withheld without explanation. Processes are centralized and opaque, leaving little room to contest decisions. Communications are conveyed through handwritten letters rather than published criteria, with interviewees describing surprise site visits from the authorities where the evaluation criteria are left unclear. The seemingly random and arbitrary nature of what will elicit official sanction then leads to self-censorship, according to interviewees.

The lone woman cabinet minister has herself participated in the shrinking of the civil society space. On October 1, 2025, Kabawat issued a directive to the provincial Directorates of Social Affairs and Labor invoking Law No. 93 of 1958, the Baathist-era associations law used for decades to suppress independent civic work, requiring NGOs to obtain government approval before receiving foreign funding or joining international bodies. Thirty-one Syrian NGOs, including Women Now, Huquqyat, and Badael, had signed a joint statement objecting that the directive revived an instrument expressly designed to control civil society.

The government’s imposing of controls over civil society organizations has not been accompanied by corresponding protections. Such was made clear in April 2025, when Hiba Ezzideen al-Hajji, head of Equity and Empowerment, a women’s rights organization in Idlib, advocated on Facebook against forced marriages and calling for an investigation into the abductions of Alawite women. This provoked an online hate campaign accusing her of being an Assad agent and of fabricating reports of a “slave market” in Idlib. Within forty-eight hours, the police in Idlib closed her organization’s center, and the governor of Idlib announced that he had asked the public prosecutor to file a lawsuit against her for “insulting the hijab.” Meanwhile, the online threats against her were never investigated.

The al-Hajji case was also telling of how the official and unofficial levels of the exclusionary ecosystem dovetail and reinforce each other: The state’s response to a woman speaking publicly about violence against other women was to close her organization and prosecute her, rather than those threatening her.

Beyond Officialdom: The Wider Ecosystem of Exclusion

What emerges below the level of formal policy is an environment defined by ambiguity, where the constraints on women’s lives are distributed across local authorities, allied informal networks, individual ministry heads, and a security apparatus that selectively investigates some things and ignores others. Rules are unclear, enforcement varies, and women must constantly assess what is acceptable.

The Damascus public transport company, for instance, announced gender-segregated buses in January 2025, following pilot programs in Idlib, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs. A hospital in Damascus introduced gender-segregated work areas before reversing the policy after public outcry. Female staff at the Ministry of Education in Damascus and at a court in Homs are reportedly required to wear head coverings. One female judge reported court officials enforcing gender segregation among judges and demoting women holding senior positions. Interviewees also pointed to workplace-level restrictions such as bans on makeup, alongside broader expectations around dress and behavior communicated informally yet widely understood as binding. Each measure can be attributed to a particular institution rather than to government policy, even as the personnel implementing them are drawn from the same networks that staff the government.

In parallel, networks ideologically aligned with HTS but not formally part of the government have run what they describe as preaching campaigns. In January 2025, Idlib-based women conducted campaigns across Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Latakia, distributing Salafi garb and attempting to persuade women to wear the niqab. The campaigns were documented and promoted by clerics aligned with HTS — though, as the Syrian fact-checking platform Tahaqaq has reported, the Ministry of Religious Endowments has acknowledged that the groups operate under its supervision.

The same indirect architecture governs the response to violence against women. Between February and June 2025, at least 36 Alawite women and girls were abducted across the coastal governorates, some forced into marriage, some held for ransom. In nearly every case, police and security officials failed to investigate, sometimes blaming the families, dismissing concrete evidence, or mocking those who tried to follow up. UN experts said in July that several cases involved security actors or individuals affiliated with the transitional government itself. A government inquiry announced in November concluded that there had been only one genuine kidnapping, the rest being women who had voluntarily left home or fled domestic violence. The inquiry was rejected by Amnesty International, by the UN, and by Syrian civil society. In July, armed groups affiliated with the government abducted at least 105 Druze women and girls during the violence in Sweida. The journalist Nour Suleiman was then prosecuted for online comments about the abductions, being accused of spreading false news. The state’s reaction is consistent across these cases: waffling where the victims are minority women, swift where the speakers are women describing what was done to them.

For feminist activists, the cumulative effect is a calculation about what visible engagement now costs. Interviewees describe targeted harassment, death threats, and reputational attacks attributed to unidentified individuals, armed groups, and online networks whose actions operate with what is perceived as official tacit tolerance.

Organizations have shut down following threats; members have withdrawn from public life or left the country. What emerges, in the words of one activist, is a new iteration of post-war survival mode, in which immediate safety is prioritized over broader political engagement, and decisions about whether to participate are shaped as much by physical security as by principle.

For instance, when a UN Security Council delegation visited Damascus in December 2025, participation was limited to a narrow group of civil society actors who could safely reach the capital, excluding many of those most active in feminist work and producing a picture of the landscape unrepresentative of its reality.

Kurdish Inclusionary Model Under Threat

While a fog of ambiguity and plausible deniability obscures the transitional government’s culpability in nurturing an exclusionary environment for women across most of Syria, in the country’s Kurdish regions, Damascus’ intent is far more clear and deliberate. As the central government has expanded its authority into DAANES-controlled areas this year, Kurdish interviewees describe a concerted campaign to dismantle the mechanisms that had fostered gender equity. They point to the centralization of governance and licensing authority through Damascus-based ministries, new administrative barriers for organizations that previously operated through local systems, pressure to narrow civic work into acceptable cultural or developmental activities, and the reduced ability of Kurdish-led institutions to shape national-level political processes. They also point to the exclusion of the YPJ from integration into national military structures, and to growing pressure toward more conservative gender norms.

The YPJ issue carries particular symbolic weight. Interviewees framed their exclusion from national military integration not as a security decision but as a statement about which forms of women’s authority are considered politically acceptable. This perception has been reinforced by the continued prominence of actors associated with violence against Kurdish women leaders, including the case of Hevrin Khalaf’s assassination and the subsequent elevation of figures linked to the armed group responsible. For many activists, this points not only to exclusion but to impunity.

The broader fear among interviewees is that women’s participation will become more limited, that the institutional model for inclusion developed in DAANES over the course of the civil war will be deconstructed under a more centralized and ideologically conservative political framework.

Importantly, interviewees do not frame this as a complete collapse. Women continue organizing, building networks, and attempting to preserve existing gains. But many describe the current period as one marked by defensiveness and preservation rather than expansion, a shift from building new systems to trying to prevent existing ones from being undone.

While in most of Syria the foreclosure of women’s participation is hidden in ambiguity that the government can credibly deny, in the Kurdish areas it is visible because there are institutions to dismantle. What is common across all of Syria is a transition process that is narrowing the concept of who counts as a political actor, and who is meant to have a say in the country’s future.