Despite their multifaceted participation and their suffering in many ways, women have been relatively neglected in scholarship about war and conflict, all the more so in the Middle East and North Africa. The guiding assumption that women are part of the home and private world and not active in the public world of politics and conflict, especially in the MENA area, has long exacerbated the ways in which women’s participation has been ignored. Further, early anthropologists of the MENA region were men and talked with men in the field, who of course talked about their own worldviews and male activities. Women anthropologists going into the field during times of conflict and violence began to change the story. As a pioneer in this area, Suad Joseph (1983) showed how women maintained communications in conflict-ridden Lebanon, even across sectarian lines. In 1986 MERIP, Middle East Report, featured a special issue on women in politics and conflict zones with articles by Sondra Hale about Sudan, Mary Elaine Hegland about revolutionary Iran, Suad Joseph about Lebanon, Julie Peteet about Palestinian resistance, and Judith Tucker about nineteenth-century Egypt. Then Peteet (1992) made an outstanding contribution with her book Gender in Crisis, uncovering women’s participation in the Palestinian resistance movement and how mothering became modified by the Palestinian struggle (see also Peteet 1997). Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh (2002) analyzed women, sexuality, and reproduction in the Palestinian struggle. With Penny Johnson, Joseph went on to edit a 2009 special issue of JMEWS titled “War and Transnational Arab Families.” Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh (2021) published his book Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran-Iraq War, based on his extensive research about Iranian women in the destructive eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980–88). Most unfortunately, civilian deaths in war have greatly increased since 2010, with a heavy concentration in the MENA/Western Asia region. Women and children have suffered terribly through all of this. Azadeh Moaveni (2019) published her Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS as part of the aftermath of the US war against Iraq.However, all too often, women’s stories and women’s contributions and roles in war and conflict are neglected. As horrifying as it is to hear about the suffering of women and children in conflict zones, we must document and analyze the participation in so many ways of these more vulnerable and sometimes terribly brave and intrepid people to remind all of the terror and pain of war and conflict.Given the dearth of materials about Middle East women in war and conflict zones—with the exception, to a degree, of the Palestinian struggle, we can welcome S. Behnaz Hosseini’s book Women in Conflict and Post-conflict Situations. The book includes seven studies about women who have experienced the results of conflict in the Middle East—including trafficking in Austria and the exilic Gülen community in Brazil—and also in Guatemala. A conference, “Women Solidarity during the War in Iraq and Syria,” held at the University of Vienna on May 27, 2017, prompted Hosseini to publish this volume. She dedicated the book to “the Yazidi women who were subjected to captivity and rape, sexually enslaved and killed since 3 August 2014.” Her own contribution to the book also focuses on the plight of Yazidi women. The volume sets a good example of cooperation among scholars from different countries: authors come from Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Iran, Iraq, Poland, and the United States.In her chapter, “Religious Fundamentalism and Slavery: Yazidi Women under the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” Hosseini looks at the rise of religious fundamentalism in Iraq and Syria and the victimization of females in these countries following President George W. Bush’s declaration of war on Iraq in 2003. Resulting from the war and chaos in Iraq, the emergence of the Islamic State (ISIS) included brutal treatment of those deemed deviant under the teachings of this extremist, terrorist movement. Hosseini examines ISIS leaders’ discourses and how they defend their behaviors by (mis)using Islamic sources. They have developed a “regulation booklet” (10) on dealing with captivity and prisoners and textually justifying their sexual violence in their perpetration of genocide. ISIS, Hosseini comments, can be classed as a much more extreme example of “religious violence” (11) than other Muslim fundamentalist movements. Other movements also employ “patriarchal values” through “religious, cultural, and political structures” (7).For this article Hosseini interviewed five women who had been trafficked by ISIS, sold or given as sex slaves, and then managed to return to Iraqi Kurdistan. During the research, they were living in a refugee camp. Painful as it is to read about the torture—multiple rapes to the point of unconsciousness, beatings, children taken away, bodies treated as remuneration for soldiers killed—that these Yazidi women have suffered, Hosseini is to be applauded for bringing this horrific treatment of women in war and conflict to a larger audience. In this case, Behnaz emphasizes, religion and terrorism empowered each other.By using the published works by Yazidi women, written in cooperation with journalists, Joanna Bocheńska lets Yazidi women speak for themselves as much as possible. While drawing mainly on four books coauthored by Yazidi women, Bocheńska also lists other works; the genre continues to grow, she comments. It is encouraging to realize that women’s stories and memoirs of the experiences in war and conflict zones are increasingly available to the public. Bocheńska analyzes the four books in light of Jeffrey Alexander’s ideas about “cultural trauma” (25). Given aspects of Yazidi culture, extreme in its condemnation of sexual congress of Yazidi females with non-Yazidi men, ISIS leaders wielded rape and sex enslavement and the resulting pregnancies perhaps as a conscious effort to destroy the Yazidis.Using the four narratives, Bocheńska shows the efforts to emphasize the pain of the Yazidi women and to attribute the responsibility for this horror to the perpetrators and the lack of intervention by others: other Muslims, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and the West. Bocheńska focuses mainly on the ISIS genocide and sex enslavement in the Yazidi community of Shingal, Iraq, in August 2014. The “trauma process” can “reimagine” (28) the thousands of Yazidi women’s loss of honor and chastity, with accompanying shame, fear, dehumanization, and ostracism. Their experiences can be retold in stories of agency, dignity, courageous tactics, and new identities that should be met with recognition, redress, and reintegration.The next essay, “Kurdish Women Challenges and Struggle at the Time of Conflict and Post-conflict: An Exploratory Research Study of Status of Kurdish Women in Iran,” by Soraya Fallah, presents another example of women speaking from their own experience. Fallah, who is from the Kurdish town of Baneh, in far western Iran, was imprisoned four times and suffered a miscarriage due to torture while in solitary confinement. After she and her family received political asylum, Fallah earned her EdD from California State University, Northridge. She serves as an academic/social worker, mainly with young disabled refugees. In her contribution Fallah provides background about the Iranian Kurds and the triple jeopardy Iranian Kurdish women face. She presents their activism in four stages after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. As one example of horrific treatment as punishment for sometimes very mild forms of resistance, Fallah found the names of many of the more than sixty Kurdish women shot by the Islamic Republic of Iran between 1979 and 1988.Fallah’s research about Kurdish women’s resistance and the retribution they suffered is particularly difficult for me to read. I am not an objective bystander to all of this. I have lived in Iran and loved many Iranian and Kurdish friends since 1966. I still maintain connections from my experiences as a 1966–68 Peace Corps volunteer in the Kurdish city of Mahabad, Iran, teaching English in the girls’ high school. During a government crackdown against Kurdish dissidents in the late spring of 1968, with a student of mine, also a Qazi, I visited the home of a daughter of Qazi Mohammad—the president of the Kurdish Republic of 1946. Because of an agreement arranged by the CIA, the Iraqi Kurds no longer allowed Iranian Kurds to cross the border. Some Iranian Kurdish dissidents had been killed. I sat with the daughter of Qazi Mohammad while she wept softly at this additional loss. While on the way to school to administer final exams, I was told that the naked body of one of the killed Kurdish men was tied to a ladder propped up in the main square of Mahabad with a sign around his neck saying, in effect, This is what happens to those who resist the government. Another body was hung from a helicopter circling over Mahabad. Another daughter of Qazi Mohammad, Effat Ghazi, was killed in Sweden on September 6, 1990, when she opened an envelope bomb apparently intended for her husband, a well-known Kurdish activist.After earning her BS and two MS degrees at Birzeit University, Luna Shamieh received her PhD in 2021 from the National University of Public Service in Budapest. In this volume her contribution, “Women Support of Insurgency in Syria,” is based on interviews with women living in the worst areas of the conflict. Like other authors, Shamieh provides a helpful background—definitions, studies, and categories of insurgencies and reasons for insurgencies—as well as a condensed historical perspective of insurgency in Syria. She reviews the various oppositional factions in Syria and their aims and strategies, identities, and estimated numbers of militants and supporters. For the research, field-workers used a “structured interview form” (104) to investigate women’s desires for the continuation of the conflict, support for which side, desired means of struggle, and attitude about involving outside support. She used a convenience sample of three hundred women in four areas of intense conflict and provided quantitative results. Clearly, women who supported the government and those who supported the insurgents both wanted security, safety, peace, education, and economic development. Both categories of women were driven also by “revenge and desperation” (110). All women stood against violence against civilians and innocent people, and 58 percent of respondents wanted “an immediate and unconditional end of the conflict” (114).For her chapter, “Emulating the Prophet’s Wives: Reimagining Hicret among Women in the Gülen Community in Brazil,” Liza Dumovich conducted ethnographic/participant observation fieldwork among women Gülen members in Brazil between 2015 and 2017. Dumovich lists her fieldwork experiences in her methodology section (other chapters also describe methodologies). This author gives in-depth information about two of the Gülen women in Brazil and their flight from Turkey after the attempted coup on July 15, 2016, which Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan blamed on Fethullah Gülen. Dumovich recounts how the Gülen community members compare their escape to Brazil after the purge and imprisonments following the attempted coup to the flight of the Prophet Mohammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina (hicret in Turkish). The author presents an extensive analysis of how the women provide service (hizmet) through their hospitality, exemplary purity and piety, and teaching, both to their own community and to their Brazilian neighbors, emulating the Prophet’s wives and thereby making spiritual sense of their exilic situations.In “Behind the Rhetoric of Post-conflict: Gendercide in Guatemala,” Lauren Grant accuses the Guatemalan government of covering up the high rate of killing of Mayan women (genocide) by using the terminology post-conflict. The ethnic cleansing—the genocide against the indigenous Mayan population—has actually not ended, she charges, but has turned to targeting Mayan women. Grant condemns the Guatemalan government’s refusal to take responsibility for past and present violence. She honors Mayan women’s organizing and voicing of their experiences despite the danger. Grant’s chapter presents another example of violence against women as a weapon to obliterate a group, similar to the treatment of Yazidi women by ISIS. Her work constitutes a strong condemnation of violence against women as a weapon of war and annihilation, as do all these contributions.In their chapter, “Trafficking in Human Beings as a Consequence of Vulnerabilities in Conflict and Post-conflict Situations: The Case of Austria,” Evelyn Probst and Isabella Chen emphasize how war and conflict increase the vulnerability of women and children. In situations of conflict, women and children may have little or no choice and therefore may be forcibly trafficked. Probst and Chen discuss ways to identify potentially trafficked persons, not to prevent them from migrating and erase their mobility but to assist them early on. One of their three case examples focuses on a woman and her daughter fleeing from conflict in Afghanistan who were trafficked to Austria.All the chapters in this volume uncover women’s activism as well as violence and discrimination against women as part of war and conflict. The contributors, some of them first-time academic publishers, have shown courage and commitment in their efforts to show the English-reading public the terrible treatment of women during times of conflict and the ways the women have tried to cope with and make sense of their suffering. Although copyediting would have improved the chapters’ readability, they all make significant contributions to acknowledging women’s efforts in war and conflict and to publicizing dreadful war crimes against women as part of the effort to prevent further violation of their rights and their well-being.