Years of war in Syria have left behind many widowed women who have been forced to become the breadwinners and enter the labor market despite not having educational or professional qualifications. Others whose husbands were injured or forcibly disappeared found themselves forced to work in difficult professions in exchange for a modest financial return that would secure their families’ basic needs of food and medicine amid poverty, lack of job opportunities, displacement and loss of the breadwinner.

“I did not expect that the harsh conditions would one day push me to engage in a profession reserved for men,” Karima al-Sheikh, 31, said as she mixed sand and cement to make bricks in a camp on the outskirts of al-Dana city in the northern countryside of Idlib. 

“Since our displacement from the village of Kafr Nabudah in Hama countryside in 2019, I have been staying with my six children in this makeshift camp, which lacks all of life's requirements,” Sheikh told Al-Monitor.

She said her husband was arrested at a Syrian government checkpoint four years ago while he was headed to Damascus, and she still knows nothing about his fate.