Kidnapped, abused: Reports of missing Alawite women in Syria
Maissun Melhem

Dozens of Syrian Alawite women are missing — thought to have been abducted or worse. Motives behind the suspected abductions are thought to be political and criminal.

 

Nora looks into the camera, her baby on her lap. She looks thin, her hair and eyebrows have been shaved off and she has scars on her face. The first pictures of the woman, taken after her release from captivity, were immediately spread on social media.

Nora — her real name has been withheld for security and privacy reasons — is one of dozens of women from the Syrian Alawite minority thought to have been kidnapped. She has since left the country.

Nora says she was held in a basement for around a month, where she was physically and psychologically brutalized. She was in the coastal city of Jableh, with her 11-month-old baby, on the way to an aid center when she was stopped by a car with Idlib license plates, filled with masked men. They asked her where she came from and when she said she was Alawite, she was dragged into the car and blindfolded.

"Every day I was abused and beaten, so much so that I lost consciousness," Nora told DW. While imprisoned, her baby was taken away from her and she was told she should sign a marriage contract. "I refused to do so, I'm already married," she explained. "After that they treated me with even more brutality."

Photos of her beatings were sent to her family as a way to blackmail them into sending ransom money. After her family paid a large ransom, Nora was set free. Today she lives outside of Syria and is being treated for serious gynecological problems. 

Similar incidents reported

Nora's story has been repeated elsewhere. News agency Reuters has reported on other abductions of Alawite women and conducted detailed interviews with families of the missing women. "Detailed interviews with the families of 16 of the missing women and girls found that seven of them are believed to have been kidnapped, with their relatives receiving demands for ransoms ranging from $1,500 to $100,000," Reuters reported. "There has been no word on the fate of the other nine."

The United Nations' Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic has also documented several cases.

The commission "documented abductions by unknown individuals of at least six Alawi women this spring in several Syrian governorates," the chair of the commission Paulo Sergio Pinheiro told the UN Human Rights Council at the end of last month. "The whereabouts of at least two of these women remain unknown, while the commission has received credible reports of more abductions. Investigations into some of these incidents were opened by the interim authorities."

At the time of writing, Syria's Ministry of the Interior had not replied to enquires on the subject, nor did they reply to Reuters' enquiries.

Syrian activist Bassel Younus, who lives in Sweden, told DW he's documented around 40 missing women. He monitors human rights abuses in Syria and notes that the majority of the women abducted were from the Alawite community.

The Alawite minority has come under attack since the ousting of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, whose family — the long time authoritarian leaders of the country — come from the Alawite community themselves. Some Islamist extremists see Alawites as apostates. Other Syrians believe the Alawites to have been supporters of the country's former dictator. 

In March, Syria saw a major outbreak of violence against the Alawite community after supporters of ousted President Bashar Assad launched attacks on the new Syrian security forces. Hundreds of the security forces were killed. In the ensuing violence, an estimated further 1,500 people were killed and it's thought that at least some of the perpetrators had links to the new Syrian government.

The country's interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa created a committee to investigate the violence but as yet, it has produced no results.

The incidents with Alawite women are not a coincidence, Younus said. "They are a symbol of the subjugation of an entire community," he explained. Nora also recalls being called names, like "pig" and "infidel," while she was in captivity.

DW attempted to speak with more than a dozen victims' families over the course of several weeks, although many of them didn't want to go on the record due to fear, shame or uncertainty.

Sami, a young man from a village near the west Syrian city of Tartus, was one of the few that would speak to media, albeit with his last name kept confidential. 

His 28-year-old sister, Iman — her name has also been changed to protect her identity — disappeared without a trace after she drove into the city one day. Shortly afterwards the family got a call from an international phone number in which an anonymous voice told them: "forget Iman, she will never return."

Sami contacted the local police but they told him that in many of these cases, the women were having a secret love affair and had simply run away from their families. But a few days later, the kidnapper got in touch again and this time demanded a five-figure ransom.

The family managed to borrow the money and sent it to Turkey using the so-called "hawala" system, an informal network of money transfers that relies on private individuals passing cash onwards. That makes trying to trace where the ransom money ended up difficult, although documents sighted by DW show that the first recipients were Syrian refugees in Turkey. But for Sami and his family, paying the money didn't help. After they sent the cash, contact was broken off and there's been no further sign of Iman.

 Sex slave rumors

Maya, 21, is another young woman who was kidnapped, together with her younger sister, near Tartus. Her name has also been changed to protect her privacy. In March the two girls were on the way to do some shopping when they were stopped by masked men with guns.

"They asked us if we were Alawite or Sunni," Maya says. "When we said 'Alawite,' they pulled us into a van without license plates."

They were blindfolded and driven for what seemed like hours. During the trip, they were insulted as "unbelievers" and as remnants of the Assad regime. The kidnappers told them they were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of their colleagues, anti-Assad fighters, Maya remembers.

The sisters were held in a basement and Maya says they were frightened they would be sold as slaves. Syrian social media is buzzing with suggestions that the kidnapped Alawite women are being sold at "slave markets," in the same way that female members of the Yazidi minority were "sold" by the extremist "Islamic State" group when they came to power in Iraq and Syria. However it is also clear that a lot of Assad regime supporters, both inside and outside the country, are pushing these kinds of rumors for their own political ends. 

"So far we have no evidence that Alawite women have been systematically enslaved, as was the case with Yazidi women back then," Bassam Alahmad, executive director of Syrians for Truth and Justice, told DW. But he says religious affiliation is increasingly playing a role in kidnappings and murders. "Alawite women are now being targeted because of their religion and there's a parallel to the Yazidi women in this," he explained.

The heart of the problem though, he adds, is that the Alawite community is being targeted for real or assumed links to the Assad regime.

Maya and her sister were eventually released. It is unclear why they were let go but after two months, they were allowed to return to their family. They survived, although many other women are still missing.

This story was originally published in German.

 

https://www.dw.com/en/kidnapped-abused-reports-of-missing-alawite-women-in-syria/a-73217254

 

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