“From Minab to Gaza to Washington: A Bleak International Women’s Day”

International Women’s Day arrives this year on 8 March under the shadow of a grim and familiar paradox.

Although there is little clarity over the reasons for the unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran, the need for regime change, with Trump and Netanyahu being seen as the saviours of a repressed people, has been one of the most rehearsed.

There is no doubt that Iran’s rulers have imposed a system that controls and monitors women at every stage of their lives. Mandatory dress codes, restrictions on movement, and the violent suppression of dissent are central to its political administration. The bravery of Iranian women, from schoolgirls removing their headscarves to mothers demanding justice for their children, has become one of the most powerful moral forces in the region.

However, the killing of 165 young primary school girls in Minab by the USA and Israel on the first day of the war highlights a truth that policymakers in Washington and Jerusalem have repeatedly failed to absorb. Carpet bombing may satisfy a powerful lust to achieve change by violence but on its own it has never delivered the political outcomes promised. History has shown it does not weaken regimes but strengthens or destroys them. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria are four prime examples of reckless attacks on sovereign nations with no thought as to what will happen after the carnage. What it produced was a huge loss of life, grief, displacement, and the erosion of civil society, the very foundations upon which women’s rights depend.

There is also a special irony in the President of the United States, who is alleged to be covering up his involvement in the Epstein files, supposedly worrying about the rights of women in another country thousands of miles away.

If we were to suspend credibility and accept this explanation as a reason for the war at face value, a more honest approach is necessary. This would begin by recognising Iranian women not as symbols to be rescued, nor as collateral in a strategic contest, but as political actors in their own right. Their demands for dignity, autonomy, and the rule of law cannot be delivered by Trump and Netanahyu, who have their own political axes to grind. They require sustained diplomatic pressure, economic measures targeted at the state rather than the population, and international support for civil society networks that already exist inside the country.

These examples where lives are discounted and absorbed into the background noise of macho conflict, is not unique to Iran. In Gaza and Sudan, mothers have struggled to feed their children and keep them safe and warm while their whole world has been destroyed. The destruction of infrastructure, the collapse of basic services, and the grinding uncertainty of displacement have left women carrying the heaviest burdens of wars they did not choose.

So, 115 years from the first women’s march for equality and justice these crises form a bleak tableau. They show that the world is not moving steadily toward equality but lurching into a period of regression. Women are facing violence from states, from armed groups, from economic systems that leave them precarious, and from social structures that still struggle to take their rights seriously.

Bombardment has never delivered the political transformation promised. It has not toppled regimes, it has shattered communities. It has not liberated women. It has placed them in the crossfire. And scandals involving powerful men have not been aberrations; they have been symptoms of a society based on inequality, wealth and power.

International Women’s Day should be a reminder that progress is neither linear nor guaranteed. The rights women fought for over a century ago are not secure. They require vigilance, consistency, and a willingness to confront power.

If there is a thread of hope, it lies in the resilience of women themselves: Iranian schoolgirls who refuse to be silenced, Palestinian mothers who rebuild amid devastation, American women who demand justice despite the odds.

Their courage, however, is not a substitute for real and lasting change that interrogates a system that is built on power, inequality and injustice.

One hundred and fifteen years on, the world owes them more than admiration. It owes them action and the honesty to recognise how far we still are from the promises made in 1909.