I met Maria Jirjis at a café whose front overlooks “Lovers’ Street” in the Syrian city of Homs. She sat in the chair across from me, exhaling the smoke of her hookah between one sentence and the next. Leaning toward me with a sarcastic smile, she said, “Who would have imagined that smoking a hookah could become dangerous in Syria, especially on Lovers’ Street?”

On Lovers’ Street, once lined with shops and cafés and long a destination for young people from different sects, the movement of women in the evenings has declined. It used to be a refuge for them to change the mood, for leisure and shopping. Today, cafés stand empty of their regular patrons, and members of the General Security forces are deployed along its length.

Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the rise to power in Damascus of forces with a religious background, Syria has entered a new phase of conflict. This conflict is not necessarily waged with weapons, but rather over bodies, ideas, and public space. After Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham dissolved itself and announced what it called a “transitional government,” determined attempts emerged to reshape society according to a hardline religious model that had prevailed in Idlib over recent years, when the former Jabhat al-Nusra was in power and from which today’s authority is formed.

In this phase, women have been transformed into an “instrument,” whether for display at official events or for discipline and intimidation. Here, we are not only speaking of the sectarian massacres in the coast and in Sweida, but also of abductions, intimidation, forced confessions, and all crimes with sectarian dimensions in Syria. In parallel, campaigns have emerged calling for modesty and the wearing of the niqab, as if women’s bodies have become a “battlefield,” where pressure intensifies against women whose clothing or way of life does not conform to the image of the “committed” woman now being promoted in Syria.

Here the question emerges: how do women belonging to religious minorities live in cities whose identity and way of life have changed? And how do they negotiate, on a daily basis, with new authorities that impose restrictions they feel weigh on them with every movement or decision?

Here, I attempt to answer these questions by telling the stories of three women, each of whom navigates in her own way and creates spaces for life in the face of these new constraints.

Life as We Want It… Not as It Is Imposed on Us

Maria (22), who comes from a Christian family in the countryside of Homs, believes that controlling women’s appearance has become a new form of violence exercised by the new authority against women. Between the desire to remain as she was and the fear of clashing with those in power, she lives a daily struggle between survival and choice. Maria explains: “Choosing simple things like what to wear or where to move around has become like walking through a minefield. One mistake could cost you dearly.”

The city of Homs is considered one of Syria’s more conservative cities. Before the war, it was home to a Sunni majority, a large portion of whom were displaced during the Syrian war under the Assad regime. After the fall of the regime and the return of some of the displaced who are now referred to as the “majority,” along with an increasing trend among residents and some authorities toward the Islamization of the city, it has become difficult for women belonging to “minorities” to move about with uncovered hair or in “immodest” clothing in Sunni-majority or religiously conservative areas, out of fear of harassment.

The Damascus–Sweida Road Is Paved with Blood

Over the phone, Rita’s voice did not sound as I knew it. Despite having met several times and spoken on the phone before, I could barely recognize it this time. Only the accent of the people of Sweida remained familiar. After the Sweida massacres that erupted last summer, in which gunmen affiliated with the Damascus government took part and which left more than 1,000 people dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rita’s life and her view of the world around her were turned upside down.

“We are thinking of nothing but survival, one day at a time. That is what our life has become,” Rita (a pseudonym) says as she begins to describe the current situation in Sweida. She continues: “There is fear, a lack of safety, and people are exhausted and suffocated.”

Life has partially returned to normal in Sweida, but movement, especially for women, remains restricted and governed by necessity and other considerations, whether inside the city or on the road to Damascus, which is a vital and necessary passage for Sweida’s residents. Rita explains: “Personally, my father now comes with me when I go down to Damascus, and other women go with their brothers or husbands. Very few go down alone without a man.”

After the massacre, society, the family, and the state have gained greater authority over women in Sweida, particularly the authority of the family under the pretext of protection. For example, Rita’s father forced her to wear the hijab on their way to Damascus and while moving around inside the city. Recounting the incident, her voice heavy with sadness, Rita says: “It was the first time in my life that my father ever forced me to do something. I started crying and told him that I did not even know how to wear it. That moment hurt me deeply.”

Despite the end of the massacre and the announcement of a ceasefire between the warring parties in Sweida, the targeting of civilians continues, especially along the Sweida–Damascus road. Rita says: “Even if the road is dangerous, I still have to go down to Damascus, I have many commitments there. I will keep wearing the hijab, hoping that if they see me veiled, they won’t target me on the road.”

The massacres in Sweida have caused a deep rupture between social and cultural components. In Damascus, Rita no longer wears the same clothes and tries to conceal her accent to avoid harassment or even political arguments. She explains: “I’ve started to feel anxious every time I meet people or attend trainings. I’m always thinking about the stereotypes they have about me because I’m Druze from Sweida, like I’m a traitor, a separatist, against the state.”

For Rita, fear still governs the scene in Syria. Once again, she finds herself trembling at security checkpoints, carefully deleting all information related to her personal life and her work as a journalist from her phone, and avoiding political discussions with strangers or even posting her opinions and samples of her work on social media. Despite this, Rita resists by continuing to practice journalism away from the spotlight, striving to convey the voice of her city’s people.

The New Reality Through a Woman’s Lens

On the country’s coastal edge, Sally stands at a corner of the covered market in the old city of Latakia, raising her camera and trying to capture what others overlook. Sally Mansour, a woman in her thirties from the Alawite community, is not searching for images that merely follow social media trends. Instead, she looks for honest moments that reflect the reality of the city and its residents, through living scenes of people and their ways of life.

Sally began her journey in photography in the period following the fall of the Assad regime. When I asked her why she chose this particular moment, she answered: “I saw everything around me changing, and I said I had to document this transitional phase in Syria’s history not only for its political significance, but also for its social one.”

The lifestyle of Latakia’s predominantly Alawite residents has changed during this transitional period, especially for women. Due to kidnappings that have targeted at least 33 Alawite women, according to a Reuters report, most women now make sure to go out accompanied by a family member if they must leave the house, and to return home before sunset.

Because of the clear shift in women’s clothing in the city, which had been considered “open” before the fall of the regime, some women from minority communities have seen their relationship with their bodies change. Sally says about this: “I’ve started to feel like my body is a burden. I’m constantly afraid that my back or chest might be showing from my blouse without me noticing. I always feel like I’m being watched or targeted.”

Sally tries to express herself and release her emotions through photography. Through her images, she seeks to document what is forgotten and marginalized by the media, whether historical buildings or the daily life of people in Latakia, especially women. She says: “I’m trying to draw a beautiful image and show the reality of the coastal woman, who has always been stigmatized because of the old regime.”

When I asked her to imagine a scene that reflects her reality and what she is living today, she described, using her hands, a scene in which she is sitting on the sidewalk with the camera pointed at her, taking rapid successive shots. When reviewing the photos, each image would show a different facial expression and convey a different emotion. “You could call it, in short, a sense of loss and the fragmentation of identity,” she added with a smile.

Sally believes that Syria’s new visual identity lies in the changes that have taken place in the shape of the city and on people’s faces, not in the “graphic” changes promoted by those in power. She says: “Our new identity is the hands of the young man selling bunches of parsley and cilantro on the sidewalk, the face of the woman selling the preserved produce of her land so she and her children can survive after being left without work, and the Alawite girls wearing long sleeves in the middle of summer so no one harasses them.”

Despite the difficulties she faces in moving around, Sally says she has not been subjected to harassment while photographing in the streets so far. On the contrary, she feels that the camera brings her closer to people and makes them kinder and more accepting of her. Even so, she takes precautionary measures while shooting, such as choosing places with fewer visible security presences and neighborhoods she assumes may be “more tolerant and familiar with the sight of a woman carrying a camera.”

Between the Personal, the Feminist, and the Political

What Maria, Rita, and Sally are living is not a set of isolated individual cases, but part of a broader reality in which the rules of daily life for women from religious minorities in the “new Syria” are being rewritten. In a phase that is supposedly transitional, where promises of security and justice are being revived, these women find themselves in a fragile position. Their bodies are monitored, their movement is measured, their roles are reshaped, and authorities such as society and the family reinforce their control over them with the support of the state, whether directly or indirectly.

Yet the stories of the three women also reveal that resistance to this reality is not always loud, nor necessarily public. Sometimes it takes the form of insisting on sitting in a café, writing an in-depth journalistic report, or taking a photograph in a street full of watchful eyes. Small acts of life, but in such a context they turn into political acts that manifest in defending a woman’s right to appear, to move, and to narrate.

In a country changing under the weight of sectarian tensions, the future appears bleak. But what is clear today is that women, especially those belonging to minorities, are paying the highest price, while at the same time being asked to remain silent and to mold their bodies and choices under many justifications, most notably “preserving civil peace.”

And within the insistence shown by these women, however fragile or simple it may seem, lies the essence of the Syrian moment today: women who are writing their own narrative and protecting what remains of their spaces in a country that constantly seeks to wrest them away.