Women in War has a book project which collects text written by women from the Middle East and South Asia. The women have been invited to talk about how they dealt with the coronavirus pandemic as well as war. Mizgin from Afrin, who had to flee twice because of the invasion attacks carried out by Turkey, talked about her experiences.

Other texts are from Roza Qaidi from South Kurdistan, Ahlam ben Taboon and Asma Khalifa from Libya, Reem Abd Ulhamid from Palestine, Shahlla Matin from Afghanistan.

In the introduction Women in War writes: “This collection of essays is designed to show the bigger picture of the COVID-19 experience as endured by women living in conflict zones in the Middle East including Lebanon,Tunisia, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Iran, Iraqi Kurdistan, Rojava, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Whereas most information that has been circulating concentrates on the sanitary social and economic consequences in the Western world, we asked ourselves at what level of priorities the pandemic lay in existence already wrecked by war and continuous hardship. When threatened on a daily basis with bombing, as in Syria or in Afghanistan, one can reflect on how bad Covid is in real terms, compared to everything else going on. As we found out, the results of the pandemic and the lockdown have ultimately been far more destructive than the disease itself. It has to be stated that these essays were written in 2020 and therefore document the first onslaught of the pandemic. For many of the places described here, little has changed, except for the worse, especially India."

The book can be read here

Women in War

Women in War, a non-profit organization and think-tank focusing on the role of gender in armed conflict, associated with FemAid which has been engaged in grass-roots humanitarian projects in war zones since 1993.