If you ask anyone why women in Syria should be covering their hair, they might cite the Qur’an. But why is this rule enforced so much more strictly now than it has been in the past? The answer is simple: many fundamentalist Muslims are now armed, giving them the unlimited power and impunity to suppress women, whom they believe to be the weaker gender.

I come from a conservative community in Syria, in Idlib city, and my family had tried to force me to wear the hijab at 15 years old. I won that battle: I refused to cover my hair simply because I couldn’t see why “all the women in our town do” was enough of a reason for me to do so as well. I will never forget the shame I was forced to feel when I was harassed and called names on the streets. I can’t count the number of times I was groped while on my way to school, in broad daylight. Even though I had adamantly refused to put on the headscarf, I couldn’t help but feel responsible for being touched inappropriately. But I never gave up.

After the uprising, 15 years later, I fought the battle again and lost. I had tried to resist. I had thought: I am not a foreign journalist who’s in Syria for a short trip to do some reporting before heading back home. This is my home, and I should force these people to accept who I am. I should once again fight the same battle I had fought as a teenager, this time with strange, armed men in a chaotic corner of my country, known as the most dangerous area in the entire world for journalists.

But I and other women activists and journalists had become “minors” in Syria. Any man had the right to check the length of our sweaters, the color of our outfits, who we were moving around with, and who we were talking to. They even had the right to scrutinize the fabric of our pants. Jeans signaled that we were not locals, or that we were activists, since many consider them to be a Western form of clothing.

I needed a man by my side to travel, to be able to move from one neighborhood to another. The chaperone had to be a mahram, meaning an allowable escort — a man who has a close blood relationship with me, such as my father or uncle. In my final couple of years in Syria, I had to fake having two brothers (I used their sisters’ IDs), four maternal uncles (my mother’s surname is not written on my ID, so this was easy), three cousins, and two husbands.

I ran into trouble many times. At a checkpoint in northern Aleppo in 2014, when I was still refusing to wear a headscarf, a guard asked my male chaperone, “Who is she?”

“She’s a Syrian journalist from Idlib,” my friend answered.

“A journalist? From Idlib? Are you kidding me?” the armed man mocked. “She’s obviously a foreign journalist. We don’t have any women journalists here.”

“Well, I’m from Idlib city — the Dabeet neighborhood, to be exact — and I have a heavy dialect, too. Here’s my ID,” I interjected, waving the document at him.

“Wow, you speak Arabic well,” he said. “Where did you learn it? And this ID could easily be fake.”

The idea of an impostor with fake Syrian identification papers who speaks in an authentic Idlibi dialect was, apparently, easier for the armed man to accept than the idea of an unveiled Syrian woman journalist.