marcnelsonartist

On International Women's Day, we honor the Syrian women who have carried Syria through its darkest years. Syrian women are the ones who held the revolution together when the world wasn't watching. In the earliest days of the uprising, when protesters poured into the streets, Syrian women were there, chanting, organizing, documenting, healing. They ran underground field hospitals and charity networks for families under siege. They co-founded the largest grassroots coalitions of 2011. They picked up cameras and microphones when silence would have been safer. They spray-painted defiance on walls. They fasted and prayed and organized. They did this while being targeted, arrested, tortured, and disappeared, not despite being women, but often because of it. Over 13,000 women were arrested or forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime between 2011 and 2016 alone. And still, they did not stop. When the guns got louder, the world stopped telling their stories. But Syrian women never stopped doing the work. They became doctors and nurses in bombed-out clinics. They built schools in liberated areas, trained journalists, opened women's centers, and raised children through the impossible. In the camps like Rukban, in the tents and makeshift homes on the margins of the conflict, women became the ones who held families together, who kept communities alive, who returned to help their neighbors even when they had every reason not to. Syrian women are revolutionaries. They are nurses and mothers and schoolgirls and protestors and survivors and dreamers. They are the glue that has held Syria together through more than a decade of war, displacement, and loss. To every Syrian woman: we see you. We honor you. We stand with you.