Indian peacekeeper Abhilasha Barak receives top UN gender award

Indian Army officer Abhilasha Barak has been named the recipient of the prestigious 2025 United Nations Military Gender Advocate of the Year Award. The United Nations honoured Barak for her exceptional leadership and groundbreaking community work while serving with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil).

Major Barak, who serves as the Commander of the Female Engagement Team (FET) for the Indian Battalion (INDBATT-XXVI) in Lebanon, was formally presented with the award at the UN Headquarters in New York during the annual commemoration of the International Day of UN Peacekeepers.

Empowering conflict-Affected communities

While deployed in the volatile West Asian nation, Barak led extensive, frontline grassroots initiatives that directly touched the lives of local populations navigating post-conflict recovery.

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As the head of the FET, she was recognised for breaking down cultural and structural barriers to reach sections of the local civilian population that had previously remained isolated from peacekeeping missions.

Barak directly spearheaded community outreach, healthcare workshops, and educational camps for local women and adolescent girls. She also designed and supervised localised training programmes intended to foster economic independence and livelihood recovery for women in conflict zones.

Beyond civilian outreach, she organised and executed comprehensive gender-sensitisation training modules for fellow UN military peacekeepers to ensure gender-responsive operational practices on the ground.

Barak's historic achievement at the UN follows an already stellar career within the Indian Armed Forces. Commissioned into the Army Air Defence Corps in 2018, she made history in 2022 by graduating from the Combat Army Aviation Training School in Nashik, becoming the first woman combat helicopter pilot in the Indian Army.

Qualified to fly cutting-edge operational platforms, including the Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) Dhruv and its armed variant, the Rudra, her selection highlights a unique combination of frontline technical excellence and humanitarian leadership.

The UN Military Gender Advocate of the Year Award, created in 2016, recognises individual military peacekeepers who demonstrate exceptional commitment to integration frameworks and the core principles of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security.

Barak is the third Indian peacekeeper to receive this international accolade, following in the footsteps of Major Suman Gawani (2019, South Sudan) and Major Radhika Sen (2024, Democratic Republic of the Congo). India remains one of the largest troop-and-police-contributing nations to United Nations global peace operations.