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Iranian Women and the Baghdad Airport Bombing
- Zaina Ujayli
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Description: On January 3, 2020, the United States conducted a drone strike and assassinated Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport. In the attack’s wake, social media erupted with fears about an impending war between Iran and the United States. World War III trended on Twitter in the United States with over 1.6 million tweets (Wise). While writers and political analysts have looked into the hysteric social-media response and “meme-ifying” of World War III (Wise; Steadman), the tweets following the drone strikes revealed the potency of an old argument which remains largely absent from discussion: the use of Iranian women to justify U.S. military intervention in Iran. Series of tweets posted after the 2020 Baghdad Airport Strike demonstrate that “rescuing Muslim women” rhetoric not only exists, but flourishes on Twitter. This paper analyzed over 1,000 tweets written about Iranian women between December 2019 and February 2020, coded their rhetoric, and analyzed their engagement. The results demonstrate a significant increase in rhetoric about Iranian women’s rights immediately following the drone strike both implicitly and explicitly justifying U.S. warfare in Iran on behalf of Iranian women. By using the 2020 Baghdad Airport Strike tweets as a case study, we can begin the hard conversation about how much the rhetoric of “saving Muslim women” has changed, or failed to change, since its prominence after September 11, 2001.