The Unwomanly Face of War

The struggle for women's rights is currently caught in the crossfires of wars

- Rashmi Varma

IN December 2001, the US and its allies launched their “war on terror” in retaliation for the September 11 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Centre buildings and the Pentagon. It was well known by then that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks—as the events had come to be known—were mostly young, well-educated men with engineering degrees. They were from Saudi Arabia and other places in the Middle East, in thrall of Al Qaeda, a transnational Islamist Jihadi organisation led by Osama bin Laden.

To avenge the “attack on America” by a new kind of enemy—one who defied nationalist affiliations in favour of a purportedly global religious ideology—the US and its NATO allies sent in hundreds and thousands of troops into Afghanistan, a country that seemingly had played no role in the 9/11 attacks and that had already been ravaged by the proxy wars of the Cold War era and beyond. Soon after that, troops from the US, the UK and their allies invaded Iraq, a country led by the erstwhile socialist and secular-minded dictator Saddam Hussain, thereby laying bare the politics of oil and the interests of the weapons industry propelling the inauguration of new war fronts.