Hundreds Stage Women’s Rights Protest in Jihadi-Conquered Damascus

Hundreds of people convened in the heart of Damascus, Syria, on Thursday demanding the regime replacing ousted longtime dictator Bashar Assad respect women and the basic civil rights of all.

Assad fled the country in between December 7 and 8 after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni jihadist terror organization, surrounded Damascus. Syria had been in a state of civil war since 2011, when Assad’s decision to violently repress protests for expanded human rights prompted the emergence of a slew of militias intent on toppling him. In addition to the war between Assad and the Syrian opposition, several other militant actors surfaced with other goals, such as the Islamic State terrorist organization, which attempted to establish a “caliphate” in Raqqa.

The leader of HTS, Ahmed al-Sharaa (previously known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), has endeavored in the aftermath of the fall of the Assad regime to address global concerns that he, too, will attempt to establish an Islamist caliphate in the entirety of Syria, changing his wardrobe to Western-style suits and discussing the creation of an “inclusive” government. Sharaa has claimed that his group will not persecute Syria’s many ethnic and religious minorities, such as the Christians and the Kurds, and that HTS will respect women – but has also defended Islamist governance and called those who oppose it ignorant.

The protest on Thursday was reportedly prompted not by Sharaa, but by Obaida Arnaout, an official spokesman for the HTS “transition,” who said in a recent interview that women were not “biologically” capable of holding many high-ranking government positions.

The hundreds of protesters, according to the Agence France-Presse (AFP), convened in Damascus’s Ummayad Square, where as recently as last week revelers gathered to celebrate Assad’s ouster. The group included women both clad in hijabs and without them, chanting, “the Syrian people are one.” Protesters held up handwritten signs with words such as “secular,” indicating their rejection of an Islamist government, and “no free nation without free women.”

Speaking to AFP, the protesters expressed opposition to the Assad regime but concern for what HTS will turn their country into.

“We are here in peaceful action to safeguard the gains of the revolution that has let us stand here today in complete freedom,” one protester, identified as Ayham Hamsho said, calling for a “secular, civil, democratic state.”

Another protester noted that women were “keeping up the economy” and maintaining families in the years of the civil war and deserved recognition for it.

The impetus for the protest appeared to be remarks by Arnaout on the Lebanese news network al-Jadeed this week in which he suggested HTS would shut women out of the defense ministry and potentially any role in the judiciary, including practicing law.

Women as beings, by their biological and psychological nature, are not appropriate for all jobs in the state, such as [in] the Ministry of Defense,” Arnaout reportedly said. He claimed that it was “too early” for him to say whether or not women could practice law and that the issue would be “left to the constitutional specialists and legal professionals” appointed by the jihadist terrorist organization in charge.

Arnaout also claimed that women would be allowed to pursue the “right to education,” but not in the legal field.

His appearance on Lebanese television appeared to be an attempt by HTS to calm mounting concerns about the level of repression Syrians will face in the new government. He did claim, for example, that the group would not force Christian women to wear hijab “because these matters are not a point of contention with us, and we see this matter as [that] people are free.”

The Emirati newspaper the National reported that the jihadists Sharaa is appointing to key government posts indicate that, despite his claims to forming an inclusive society, radical fundamentalist imams and other Islamist voices will control the new government. Early reports of Sharaa finding lucrative and easy posts for his families – his brother is reportedly the new health minister, for example – also cast doubt on his promises of forming a less corrupt regime than the one he toppled.

“Almost all of the new appointees are cadres drawn from HTS, the rebel group Ahrar Al Sham, an ideological twin, and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which has found a new political life by swiftly aligning with him,” the National reported. “Already some city dwellers feel unease about the influx of people into Damascus, either as visitors or members of the new HTS order.”

The newspaper also found that HTS has replaced Assad’s justice system – which had functional courts but was notorious for torturing and disappearing people – with a haphazard system in which locals are encouraged to take their grievances to designated “preachers” who then decide how to dispense justice.

Sharaa insisted in his latest remarks to the West, an interview with the BBC on Wednesday, that his “revolution can contain everybody,” including women.

“The Syrian population has lived together for thousands of years,” he asserted. “We’re going to discuss all of it, we’re going to have dialogue and make sure that everyone is represented. The old regime always played on sectarian divisions, but we won’t.”

Asked directly if HTS will impose a radical Islamist dictatorship like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Sharaa insisted that Syrians and Afghans were “completely different,” dismissing Afghans as “tribal” compared to Syrians.

Sharaa also claimed that not only would HTS respect women’s right to an education, but that it had already been doing so in the city of Idlib for nearly a decade.

Ominously, Sharaa stated that there were “many issues” that he could personally not discuss, in response to a question on whether he regime would allow the legal consumption of alcohol, because they were “legal issues” and he did not have judicial power.

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