The role of women in conflict is strangely undocumented. Christina Lamb on a powerful collection of photographs that portrays them as more than simply victims

I have a shameful confession to make. Crossing the border back into Kuwait after several weeks in southern Iraq, where I had been reporting the war, I realised that I had not interviewed a single Iraqi woman. Since I am a woman and a mother, this was particularly inexcusable. But it seems I was not alone. For all the hundreds of hours of television footage and acres of newsprint devoted to the war, one could have been forgiven for thinking that Iraq was a country of men.

When women are reported in wars, it is usually as victims, weeping over the broken bodies of sons and daughters in hospitals, or raped by enemy soldiers. Yet in many ways women are the real heroes of war. It is they who have to feed their children, protect and reassure them through long nights of bombing, pass through alleys of snipers to fetch food, and, if things become too bad, walk with their families for days to seek refuge in neighbouring countries. During the Afghan war, I met four women from Bamiyan who had walked across the mountains for two weeks, cowering from the B-52s streaming overhead and feeding their children on moss scraped off rocks, only to be turned back when they reached Pakistan. And once war is over, it is the women who must pick up the pieces, particularly those left widowed, like the ghostly figures in tattered burqas, stretching out their hands to beg, whom one sees throughout Afghanistan, a country in which 1.5 million people died.

But the role of women in war is strangely undocumented. That is perhaps partly because most war correspondents are men, partly because most news editors are testosterone-fuelled males who stick coloured pins into war-maps on their walls and are far more fascinated by the action than by how women keep their homes together in times of conflict.

One British woman has spent the past 20 years trying to shine a small light on to this neglected area. A former teacher-turned-photographer, Jenny Matthews has braved conflicts all over the world from central America to south-east Asia, on a shoestring budget largely funded by charities, gathering images of women. The result has been a stunning exhibition, "Women and War", at the Oxo Tower Gallery, which should be required viewing for any politician thinking of leading his or her country into war.

If ever a photograph encapsulated the appalling waste of war, it is that of a doll-like Vietnamese girl named Phuong, meaning Flower, aged eight. Doctors believe her mother was poisoned from Agent Orange, the chemical sprayed from American planes to strip the vegetation in which the Vietcong were hiding. Agent Orange entered the ecosystem and is now wreaking havoc on the next generation. In the diary extract that accompanies the picture, Matthews writes that Phuong "was wearing yellow sunglasses and sang beautifully. Only when she takes them off do I realise behind them she has no eyes."

These little diary snippets are one of the strengths of the exhibition, adding telling details. Yet Matthews keeps herself very much behind the lens, always the witness, referring only to the "ghosts in my darkroom", leaving us to wonder what effect seeing so much horror must have on a person.

One of the most arresting images, which also graces the cover of the accompanying book, is simply labelled Afabet, Eritrea (1988). Many women fought in the long war for independence from Ethiopia, and the picture is of Lelem, a voluptuous young woman with a Kalashnikov defiantly slung across her shoulder, hair swept up in an Arafat-style headdress, and an ammunition belt low on her waist, managing to look incredibly seductive. Were it not for the slightly haunted look in her eyes, one could almost imagine it was some kind of model shoot.

Kalashnikov Girl reminds us that although peace groups are usually dominated by women - as was the opposition to the Iraq war - women can be killers, too, viciously so in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Some of Matthews's most chilling images are from these two countries. One, of an endless pile of bones in a field in Rwanda, needs no words - the remains of almost an entire village, among the 800,000 people killed in the genocide. Another, entitled The Road to Bo, is of a skull on a stick, a roadblock in Sierra Leone guarded by the skull of a rebel called Hawai.

The directory at the back of the catalogue reads like an A-Z of forgotten conflicts of the past 20 years: Albania, Angola, Chechnya, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Liberia and Nepal, to name but a few. Matthews prefers to go to underreported places, and much of her work is from Sudan, a country which in five decades of independence has experienced a single decade of peace. One of the most horrible aspects of the Sudanese civil war is the use of hunger as a political tool. Of the two million killed, more have died in famine than in fighting. This is brought home by the anguished portrait of Ayak Agau, an 18-year-old mother, watching the burial of the daughter she could no longer feed.

Apart from the west's shameful neglect of Africa (with the notable exception of Sierra Leone), there is much here to remind us of its broken promises in other parts of the world. I was outraged at the photograph of seven-year-old Tariq lying on dirty blankets at the Indira Gandhi Hospital in Kabul, with only a stump where his hand should have been, after he picked up a plastic pen that exploded, a Soviet mine disguised as a toy. The picture was taken in 1996, and the caption describes Kabul's main children's hospital as "freezing and filthy". I was there two months ago, and for all the promises of Messrs Bush and Blair that Afghanistan would never again be forgotten, the hospital is still freezing and filthy. The children sleep three to a bed; many die on the operating table because the oxygen supply goes off during power cuts; and there is only one incubator in the neonatal unit, forcing the mothers to take 15-minute turns to watch over their sick babies.

Yet one of the joys of this collection is that it is not all misery, but more an exhibition of strength in the face of adversity, particularly the determination to look good while all around you is falling apart. So we see Nadia having her hair and nails done at a beauty salon as she prepares for her wedding in Gaza, determined it will go ahead even though the Israeli occupation of Ramallah meant many of her friends would not be able to attend; young women and soldiers smooching to a salsa beat in El Salvador amid burnt-out houses; and the beatific smile on the face of a Mozambican woman breastfeeding her baby son after walking more than 100km to escape fighting. It is hard not to smile at the proud faces of Salvadorean women learning to read and write in a camp amid war; the single mothers at a hairdressing school in Freetown plaiting each other's hair into fantastic sculptures; and women in Kabul putting on lipstick for the first time in seven years after the fall of the Taliban.

Even so, there is no escaping the brutalisation of societies exposed to war - think of Afghanistan, where two-thirds of children have seen someone killed, or Iraq, where lawlessness was unleashed the moment Saddam Hussein's regime was removed. The message of hope that you feel Matthews would like to convey is soured when you read the caption to a photograph from Sierra Leone, of a home for pregnant girls who were abducted and raped by the rebels. She describes the home as "clean and well cared for", but then recounts the housemother telling of finding some of the girls throwing stones at dogs. When she asked whether the dogs had been bothering them, they replied: "No. We want to see blood."

"Women and War" was at the.gallery@oxo, Oxo Tower Wharf, London SE1; the exhibition was organised by ActionAid. An accompanying book is available from Pluto Press (£19.99)

Christina Lamb is a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times and is the author of The Sewing Circles of Herat: my Afghan years (HarperCollins, £16.99)

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