Just days after the United States and Israel launched their first strikes on Iran, Iran’s women’s football team walked onto the pitch for their opening match at the Asian Cup and stood in silence as the national anthem played. Within hours, a state-aligned commentator branded the players “wartime traitors.” By the next match, officials were standing beside them as they sang.

Several players initially accepted humanitarian visas in Australia – only for most to withdraw their asylum claims amid reports their families had been threatened. Most of the team has now returned to Iran.Their dilemma offers a glimpse of what war and political upheaval may mean for Iran’s 45 million women.

The first days of the war have already shown its human cost. One of the earliest attacks reportedly hit a girls’ elementary school in the southern city of Minab, killing at least 168 people, most of them children aged seven to twelve. Investigations into this strike are still ongoing, but the devastation is clear: classrooms destroyed and families mourning daughters who never came home. 

These tragedies point to a deeper danger: when ideological regimes face violent upheaval, women’s rights are often among the first casualties. Successors seeking to demonstrate ideological purity frequently tighten control over women’s lives.

This has happened before.

Across Africa, extremist movements have repeatedly used violence against women to consolidate power. In Nigeria, Boko Haram’s brutality intensified following the killing of its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, in 2009. Rather than collapsing, the movement radicalized. Under the leadership of Abubakar Shekau, kidnappings, forced marriages, and the abduction of schoolgirls escalated dramatically. Women were coerced into suicide bombings or used as instruments of propaganda and terror. What initially appeared to be a counter-terrorism success rapidly became a humanitarian catastrophe. 

Here in South Africa, we have seen how political crises reshape women’s lives. As the apartheid state grew more desperate to maintain control, it responded with escalating repression. Women activists were detained without trial, subjected to surveillance and harassment, and frequently targeted alongside their children in efforts to crush dissent. The struggle for political freedom was inseparable from the struggle for women’s dignity and autonomy. Femicide rates remain six times higher than the global average.

Afghanistan offers an even starker warning. After two decades of international intervention ended and the Taliban returned to power in 2021, women’s rights collapsed almost overnight. Today, according to the United Nations, nearly eight in ten young Afghan women are excluded from education, employment or training. Entire generations have been pushed out of public life into the shadows.

Iran could follow this same pattern.

Under the new ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has taken over from his slain father, women could face harsher dress codes, expanded surveillance, and stronger enforcement by morality police. The fragile gains Iranian women have fought for could quickly be reversed.

This would be particularly tragic because Iranian women have been among the most courageous opponents of authoritarian rule in the country.

In 2022, the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police sparked nationwide protests. Amini had been detained for allegedly wearing her hijab “improperly.” Her death ignited the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, in which women publicly removed their headscarves, cut their hair in protest, and confronted security forces in the streets. The demonstrations spread across the country and inspired solidarity movements around the world.

For a moment, it seemed as though Iranian women might be forcing a historic shift in their country’s political trajectory. But wars have a way of silencing precisely the voices that challenge repression. 

Ultimately, any crackdown on women’s rights could leave Iran more isolated than ever. Influential leaders from across the Muslim world have already made clear that they will make it harder to cloak repression in religious legitimacy. 

Only last year, the world’s largest Islamic NGO, the Muslim World League, convened the International Conference on Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities, bringing together senior Islamic scholars, political leaders and civil society groups. Led by the League’s Secretary-General, Dr. Mohammad Al-Issa, scholars representing a wide range of Islamic traditions — including conservative Deobandi and Hanafi schools — joined Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai to affirm that educating girls is fully consistent with Islamic teaching.

The conference produced the Islamabad Declaration, which states clearly that there is no basis in Islam for denying girls access to education or excluding women from public life. By rooting the case for girls’ education in theological teaching, the initiative directly challenged extremist ideologies like the Taliban’s and even exposed rare internal tensions within the movement.

That shift matters now. If Iran’s new leadership seeks to justify harsher restrictions on women in the name of religion, it will not be able to claim uncontested religious authority. But this moral argument must be backed by global resolve. 

If the international community truly wants justice for the people of Iran, it must look beyond battlefield narratives. It must protect activists, amplify Iranian women’s voices and refuse to treat their rights as collateral damage in geopolitical struggles.

Donald Trump called Khamenei’s death “justice for the people of Iran.” But justice cannot be measured by the fall of a single man. It must be judged by whether ordinary people – especially women – emerge safer and freer afterward.

Because history offers a sobering lesson: when wars reshape ideological regimes, women’s freedoms are often the first casualties – and the hardest victories to reclaim.

Aaliyah Vayez is a South African political and security risk analyst specializing in African geopolitics, foreign policy, and global governance. She has advised governments, international institutions, and multinational firms on geopolitical risk and regulatory intelligence across Africa and emerging markets, including work on BRICS expansion and G20 dynamics. Her commentary has appeared in BBC Africa, TRT Global, The Guardian, and more. 

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