By Jeremy Ball, Social affairs correspondent, BBC East Midlands

• Published7 September 2025, 01:09 BST

A former soldier who came under mortar fire in Iraq says women who performed dangerous front-line roles need more recognition and support.

Dr Bex Bennett, from Derby, co-founded the community interest company Sisters in Service, which has recruited 160 members across the UK since its inception in May last year.

The group helps female military veterans, who now work in healthcare, to support each other through meetings and activities.

Dr Bennett, now an NHS forensic psychiatrist in Nottinghamshire, says women face additional challenges because so few people understand their military experience.

Dr Bennett trained at Sandhurst with the Duke of Sussex and spent several years as a British Army officer with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.

A separate deployment in southern Afghanistan involved travelling to remote bases and interacting with local communities.

She believes many people still have a “very outdated idea” that only men deploy to the front line in modern conflicts.

“Often women go out alongside their male counterparts and do female searching and engage with female civilians,” Dr Bennett says.

Dr Bennett jokes about close shaves when mortars landed within metres of where she was sleeping in Iraq.

“I managed to avoid anything particularly catastrophic… although my laundry did get blown up one time,” she says.

“When anyone has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, it will always leave some scars, it can sometimes be really difficult to talk about.

“When I left the military, I did feel quite isolated, I felt quite alone. I don’t think anyone really understood my journey.”