The unfolding Arab Spring brought about unprecedented women’s participation in demonstration squares, social media, and overall political presence. This activism created certain anxieties for supporters of the old regimes who resorted to reviving traditional cultural myths, such as that of the Jahiliyyah’s wa’d, to dub these women as “bad girls.” Interestingly, these women retaliated by owning their “bad girl-ness” and incorporating this trope as part of their revolutionary discourse. In this vein, the Syrian writer Samar Yazbek epitomizes “bad-girlhood” when as an ‘Alawite she participated in the revolution against that country’s tyrant, a member of her own religious sect, Bashar al-Assad. A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution was Yazbek’s courageous response to the defamation propaganda that threatened to bury her alive, akin to the traditional victims of wa’d, for the treason of leaving the clan and embracing the other. In her diaries, Yazbek revives the context of the wa’d myth, traditionally seen as a safeguard against the infiltration of the enemy through the women who are taken as spoils in tribal raids, and shifts its application from the women to the victimized citizens and country instead. In so doing, she manages to move the wa’d trauma from its personal realm where it can be construed as an archaic issue affecting women in the past, to a vital contemporary issue afflicting the whole nation. In Yazbek diaries, the wa’d trope is activated as a symbol denoting despotic practices of authoritarian regimes. The manner in which she describes how political dissidents are buried alive in the regime’s prisons, is akin to the wa’d ritual. This explains the prevalence of multiple revolutionary banners, particularly in the context of the Syrian revolution, contesting the burial of the country and its people under such oppressive powers. Yazbek’s transition from the regime’s good daughter to bad-girlhood reflects the process of her iconization and demonization, and simultaneously mirrors the anxieties she generates and endures as a result of her daring act. The anxiety of erasure that she exhibits is directly tied to the historical wa’d’s trauma, to the erasure of women’s voices. The expression of such anxieties in the national consciousness bespeaks of the survivability of these cultural myths in the turbulent, political climate of the Arab uprisings. The pioneering work of Cathy Caruth and Jan Bardsley on trauma and women’s transgressive behavior will inform the theoretical framework of my research.