hejab

“Once they finally took me to the medical center, the nurse took my temperature. She said ‘you need to take that thing off your head’ and took off my hejab without asking my permission.

I told her you can’t take off my hejab and she said this is for your health,” the doctoral student explained.

Like many people from Deir al-Zor, a conservative Sunni Muslim city on the banks of the Euphrates river, she dresses modestly and wears a headscarf, or hejab.

“I’ve been at war with the police over my hejab since I was 16,” she said.

Under the rule of militants such as the Islamic State, women were forced to wear hejab, discouraged from working, and often segregated from men.