'We have proved we can do anything'

Women's rights campaigners forced to work for equality underground now hope they will get aseat atthe table

- Ruth Michaelson

The feminist activist Ghalia Rahhal recalls with wry laughter her visit to the "blue building" in Idlib three years ago, an office where the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) monitored civil society organisations such as hers. Her colleague at a women's rights organisation was once called there to hear a list of issues they were banned from working on: child marriage, divorce, and anything related to gender equality.

Rahhal had already survived an assassination attempt in her home town of Kafranbel as well as the murder of her son in Aleppo, leaving her unfazed by pointed questions levelled at her by an official: we heard you were training women in the refugee camps about politics, about equality, he told her with suspicion.

Rahhal instead saw an opportunity for dialogue, wondering if she could capitalise on a chance to speak with the authority that back then ruled only the enclave of Idlib in Syria's north-west.

"Why are you angry that we are teaching them these things?" she asked him. "My goal is not to teach those women to fight you, it's for women to become decision-makers. We can't have a displacement camp full of women run by a man, to name just one example."

She continued her work in secret, providing lectures and training to women so that they would be ready to participate in a transitional government if the opportunity ever presented itself. That opportunity unexpectedly arrived last month, when former president Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow as his fearsome regime crumbled.

The Islamist group HTS, which spearheaded the insurgency that ended Assad's rule, is now the de facto authority in Syria and has begun touting many of the same ideas it once chastised Rahhal for when she taught them to women displaced by Syria's bloody civil war.

There is, so far, little clarity about how the new government will rule, particularly when it comes to women.