https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/world/middleeast/syria-kidnapping-alawite-woman-girls.htmlBy Ben HubbardPhotographs by Laura BoushnakBen Hubbard and Laura Boushnak met with and spoke to dozens of people with direct knowledge of kidnapping cases, including women and girls who had returned home.April 3, 2026A 16-year-old girl left her home in northwest Syria last May to visit a shop and disappeared.Weeks later, an anonymous stranger phoned her distraught family and said that he had the teenager and would let her go if they paid thousands of dollars in ransom, according to four people involved in her case.The family paid the ransom and the girl returned in August, more than 100 days after she had been kidnapped. She told confidants that she had been held in a dank basement and was regularly drugged and raped by strangers, the four people said.A medical exam turned up yet another shock: She came home pregnant.Since rebels ousted the dictator Bashar al-Assad in late 2024, panicked families and activists trying to help have regularly sounded the alarm on social media that women and girls from Syria’s Alawite minority have mysteriously disappeared or been kidnapped. Many fear that their sect is being targeted as retribution for the brutality of Mr. al-Assad, who also belongs to the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.The government has denied that Alawite women and girls are being targeted by kidnappers, saying that it has confirmed only one such case.But a New York Times investigation based on dozens of interviews with Alawites who say they were kidnapped, their relatives and others involved in their cases found that these abductions have been common and often brutal.The Times verified the kidnappings of 13 Alawite women and girls, in addition to one man and one boy. Five said they had been raped. Two came home pregnant.
>>533048072The family of one woman said it sent $17,000 to kidnappers who never released her, and provided screenshots of ransom demands and the money transfers. A 24-year-old said she had been held for three weeks in a filthy room where men raped her, beat her, shaved her head and eyebrows and cut her with razor blades. Her relatives also paid the kidnappers and in this case secured her release, according to four people involved in her case.Syrian activists say they know of scores of such kidnappings but details are difficult to confirm because victims and their families are too scared to talk.Most people who spoke with the Times did so on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the government or the kidnappers. The Times is not identifying most of those who were kidnapped for the same reason.The Times corroborated accounts from people who had been kidnapped and their relatives, as well as through social media posts announcing when they were taken and returned, ransom messages sent by kidnappers and interviews with medical and aid workers who spoke with the abductees after their release.The kidnappings took place against a backdrop of deep distrust between the Alawites, who make up about one-tenth of Syria’s population, and the new government. Mr. al-Assad relied heavily on his sect in his military and security services while in power.That led many of the Sunni Muslim former rebels who now run Syria to associate the Alawites with the ousted regime.Last March, that anger fueled days of sectarian violence in northwestern Syria that left about 1,400 people dead, according to a U.N. investigation. The inquiry found that some government security forces had participated in the killing, leaving many Alawites afraid of them.Many of the kidnapped women and girls, along with their relatives, said the government had failed to take their cases seriously.
>>533048112Nour al-Din Baba, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said in an interview that he could not respond to The Times’ findings unless it provided the names for the cases it had verified, which The Times declined to do. He said that pregnancies did not prove kidnappings and that ransom messages could be fabricated.“For all of those ransoms, where is the proof?” he said.He added that he stood by a government investigation released in November that examined 42 reported kidnappings and found that only one of them was “real.”In the other cases, he said, the women were involved in prostitution or other crimes, ran away with lovers or fled domestic troubles. They and their families, he said, then claimed they had been kidnapped to avoid social stigma.The kidnap victims and their relatives painted a very different picture, one of women and girls grabbed off the street by armed men near their homes or while running errands.They reported being taken by fellow Syrians or by foreign jihadists who had come to Syria during the country’s 13-year civil war, hoping to establish an Islamic state. Many women and girls reported that their captors had insulted Alawites, saying they deemed them permissible to rob and rape — a view propagated by Islamist extremists.One 33-year-old was kidnapped by four armed men last summer, according to the woman and two others involved in her case said. Like other abductees, she recalled her captors asking whether she was Alawite. She said yes and they replied that they were “‘going to have a good time,’” she recalled.“They wanted to humiliate the Alawites,” she said.Rima Flihan, the executive director of the Syrian Feminist Lobby, a nonprofit organization that has tracked kidnapping cases, said sectarian revenge drove the abductions.“It is systematic and it is targeting this community,” she said. “They are trying to make the community vulnerable.”
>>533048072>Many fear that their sect is being targeted as retribution for the brutality of Mr. al-AssadLmao what? This was always the inevitable outcome
>>533048241The Times also documented five cases of Alawite women who had disappeared and remain missing, although it was not possible to determine whether they had been abducted.One of them, Etab Jadid, 41, disappeared in May after buying ice cream near Syria’s Mediterranean coast, according to her mother, Rabiha Shabbah. The family had reported her disappearance to the police but had received no updates and have not been contacted by any kidnappers.The Times could not independently confirm all the details of the cases. But they overlapped with or bore striking similarities to others documented by rights groups. Amnesty International said in July that it had credible reports of 36 similar kidnappings and had documented eight cases.In August, a U.N. commission said it had documented six such cases and received “credible reports” of dozens more that it was still investigating.The Syrian Feminist Lobby has counted 80 Alawite women and girls who have disappeared since early 2025, Ms. Flihan said. Twenty-six of the cases were confirmed kidnappings, including of women who suffered physical or psychological abuse, she said.Ten have returned home, three are still missing and the status of the other 13 remains unclear, she said, adding that the government had not supported those who had returned.“They are more shaming the women than seeing them as survivors,” she said.All of the families that spoke to The Times said they had reported their cases to the security forces. While some dealt with sympathetic officers, many said the security personnel had been dismissive or accused the missing women and girls, without evidence, of using drugs or running away with their boyfriends.Some security officers told the families of those who had returned to lie about what had happened.
>>533048388Walaa Ismael, 24, said she was abducted near the university where she was studying in the central city of Homs in May. Her captors demanded a ransom of $15,000 but let her go after activists spread news of her disappearance online and her widowed mother told her captors that she could not pay.Ms. Ismael described her kidnappers as criminals motivated by money, not sectarianism. After she returned, she said, security officers told her family to say that she had been visiting a friend.“I said no,” her mother, Iktimal Salameh, recalled. “I put out a video to tell everyone what happened.”In an interview, a police investigator who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to journalists, said he had worked on 10 reported kidnappings and that nine of them had been “fake.” One was real, and the woman had come home pregnant.“It destroyed her life,” he said.Many of the women and girls who have returned said they suffer from trauma that has disrupted their educations, careers and sleep. Some have separated from their husbands and a few have fled Syria, fearing their kidnappers could come for them again.One 19-year-old was held for a few days last summer by a foreign jihadist, she and three others with knowledge of her case said. Since then, she said, she had been depressed, lost her love of sports and abandoned her plans to go to university.“I used to go out with my friends, but now I don’t want to leave the room,” she said. “I’m scared of the people around me.”The pregnant 16-year-old told confidants that her captors had given her sleeping pills and allowed strangers to rape her. She was released for a ransom of about $2,500 and returned to her family, poor farm laborers.Abortion is illegal in Syria, even in cases of rape. She wanted to keep the baby anyway.“It is my child,” she said. “What did it do wrong?”In February, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
>>533048072>Islamshits are rapistsAnd this is news how?
>>533048072>>533048112>>533048241>>533048388>>533048447https://apnews.com/article/syria-alawite-women-kidnapped-militants-extremists-rape-a469660022301de378d1fa130467bec0Foreign fightersAnother woman said two of her female relatives, one of them a teenager, were taken by foreign fighters from a street in March. According to the relative’s account, the two were held in the basement of a house several hours away. There, the teenager was raped by the same man for 10 days until he left. The other woman was raped by another person for about two months, after which they were set free.Another victim, who was 19, said she was taken in early July by three masked foreign fighters – an Iraqi and two non-Arabs.“You Alawites are filthy infidels,” one of the men told her. When she tried to argue and begged for her life, he hit her head against the windshield until she bled.She was locked in a basement of the Iraqi’s home. He threatened to kill her if she didn’t let him touch her. When she started screaming, he left, fearing neighbors would hear, she said.She said she tried to kill herself by breaking a glass and cutting her vein, but the cut was not deep enough.The next day, the Iraqi told her that his “emir,” a term used by jihadis to refer to their leader, had decided to set her free “on the condition that you learn about Islam.” The next morning, he put her in the car with his wife and children. On the way, he told her not to tell people she had been kidnapped but to say she’d left home of her own will to learn about Islam. They stopped and he bought her sweets from a store, then dropped her off at a taxi station in Idlib city, she said.Not long after returning home, a state investigator came to her family home and questioned her about what happened. She identified the Iraqi through security footage from the sweets shop. But it is not known if he was arrested, and officials did not comment when asked.Fearing reprisals, the family fled Syria.
>>533048580Uyghurs from the Turkistan Islamic Party are squatting in Syrian Kurdish homes in Afrinhttps://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/858069https://hawarnews.com/en/pentagon-reveals-fragility-of-transitional-government-forces-presence-of-terrorism-in-syriahttps://twitter.com/Aynur35423962/status/1561309567971098624Shame on@mbachelet21 years old innocent Uyghur man was detained in Chinese death camp.Abdusalam Hesen, 21, the reason of his detention was regional integration push.Where is he? Was he killed, organ harvested or became slave in a factor?@IntlCrimCourt@UNHumanRightshttps://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/syria-appoints-some-foreign-islamist-fighters-its-military-sources-say-2024-12-30/https://hawarnews.com/en/162095346024662https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/858069/families-of-uyghur-fighters-in-kurdish-homes-as-demographic-change-deepens
based I support rape, fuck women
>>533048072meanwhile stupid fucking white people were bitching at china for locking up the uygniggers
>>533048696A year after Assad’s fall in Syria, Alawite women face kidnappings and rapeBY BASSEM MROUEUpdated 5:15 AM UTC, December 10, 2025LATAKIA, Syria (AP) — The woman, a member of Syria ‘s Alawite religious minority, was walking home on a sunny July day in her town on the Mediterranean coast when three gunmen stopped her and pulled her into their van. It was the start of a week of torment.They drove her to a town in northern Syria three hours away, where they locked her in a room in an abandoned building. Over the coming days she was raped twice, she told The Associated Press.“You Alawite women were born to be our sabaya,” she said one of the rapists told her, using an Arabic term common among Sunni Muslim extremists for women taken in war as sex slaves. The woman, in her mid-30s, gave her account on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.Since the fall of former Syrian President Bashar Assad a year ago, dozens of women from the Alawite religious sect — to which Assad belonged — have been subjected to kidnappings and sexual assault, according to rights groups. In many cases, the attacks appear to be by Sunni extremists and jihadis motivated by sectarian hate.That has raised suspicions some are allies or former allies of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist insurgent force that overthrew Assad and was led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, now Syria’s interim president. Foreign jihadi fighters and Syrian extremists fought alongside HTS during Syria’s yearslong civil war.
>>533048798Rights groups say the attacks on Alawite women appear to be the acts of individuals, not systematic. But rights workers and victims say Syria’s new authorities are not doing enough to stop the attacks. In response to public outcry, the government set up a committee to look into reported kidnappings but said it largely found the reports false.Agnes Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, said the kidnappings “cannot be denied.”The problem, she said, “cannot be pushed away because it’s disturbing or because it’s undermining the message and the image of authorities.”Syria’s Interior Ministry spokesman did not respond to repeated questions on the assaults.The AP interviewed two rape victims and one kidnapping victim, in addition to family members of four others subjected to assaults that in three cases included rape. All spoke on condition they remain anonymous, fearing reprisals. One said she feared authorities would not protect her and later asked the AP not to cite her account.All women and relatives interviewed by the AP said they informed security forces about what happened to them and authorities took their testimonies. It was not clear if the authorities followed up further or if any arrests were made.A problem that ‘cannot be denied’Amnesty International said earlier this year it had received credible reports of at least 36 Alawite women and girls abducted between February and July. The kidnappings took place in the heartland of the Alawite population, in coastal Latakia and Tartous provinces and neighboring Homs and Hama.
>>533048921Although on a much smaller scale, the attacks recall dark memories of the Islamic State group’s enslavement of thousands of Yazidi women for rape a decade ago in Iraq. Some Sunni extremists consider Alawites heretics and believe it is religiously permitted to take their women as sex slaves. Others have targeted Alawites in revenge for atrocities against Sunnis during the 54-year rule of the Assad family, when there were widespread reports of sexual violence against women in detention centers.The attacks against women have intensified since March, when clashes between Assad supporters and security forces spiraled into sectarian atrocities in which hundreds of civilians were killed, mostly Alawites at the hands of pro-government fighters.The Interior Ministry committee investigated 42 cases of alleged kidnappings, but only found one to be a real abduction, ministry spokesman Nour al-Din al-Baba said in mid-November. The committee found that the rest were false claims or instances where a woman ran off with a romantic partner or fled domestic abuse, or cases of blackmail or prostitution, he said, without providing evidence.The ministry report “has nothing to do with reality,” says Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-alawite-women-taken-as-sex-slaves-in-syria/The Alawite women taken as sex slaves in SyriaPAUL WOODSyria’s Alawite communities are in the grip of a fear that their women and girls could be kidnapped and held as sabaya, or sex slaves. After the Assad dictatorship fell, amid revenge attacks by militias loyal to the country’s new rulers, there were reports of abductions for rape and even of forced marriage. Alawite human rights activists say that some women are still being held prisoner and that kidnappings are still happening. They accuse the Syrian authorities of being unwilling or unable to stop it.The activists say that between 50 and 60 women and girls have been taken. These numbers are small compared with the 1,600 or more civilians killed in a spasm of sectarian violence in March. Sunni militias rounded up Alawite men and boys to be shot in the streets; some – as I wrote at the time – were made to crawl to their deaths howling like dogs. But the idea that jihadis are trying to revive the practice of taking sabaya holds a special terror for Alawites. There are some credible accounts from families and in a few cases from the victims themselves.Samira, who is 23, says that she escaped after being abducted, gang-raped and sold into a forced marriage. That isn’t her real name, of course. She’s too scared to allow it to be published. We speak over WhatsApp using a translator. She tells me she was snatched off the street while visiting the city of Homs in February. This is her account of what happened:A white panel van daubed with mud for camouflage – ‘a military vehicle’ – pulled up and six men wearing balaclavas jumped out. Samira ran but they caught her and threw her into the back. She thrashed around as the van moved off, trying to free herself while hands gripped her arms and legs and punches rained down. Then one of the men raised his boot and stamped on her face. ‘I didn’t move after that.’
>>533049121They blindfolded her and the van drove on for about an hour. When it stopped, they removed the blindfold and she saw a half-finished house on a piece of stony ground. She was pushed inside and up the stairs to a room with low sofas. Some of the men kept their balaclavas on; some didn’t. Some wore the jihadis’ short galabeya, which stops above the ankles (as Mohammed wore his). Some had black headbands with the first part of the Shahada in white script: ‘There is no god but God.’A woman sat on one of the sofas, another victim, in her fifties perhaps, hair greying at the ears. She didn’t say a word, just stared into space. Samira’s blindfold went back on and her hands were tied. A man took her phone and called her family. She heard him say it would be 500 million Syrian pounds – almost £30,000. ‘If you don’t pay, we’ll send you her hand.’They told the woman, ‘No one paid for you’ and shot her in the chest,a single bullet from a KalashnikovAs night fell, however, one of the men said he would take her home. Her heart leapt. He led her away, but just to another room that had a mattress on the floor. He tried to take off her clothes. She struggled, so he called in another man. They forced her to undress. One held her down, the other raped her. ‘I fainted. When I woke up, there were seven people in the room. They took turns.’The next morning, Samira found herself alone. She opened the door and started down the concrete stairs. Someone hit her on the back on the head with a rifle-butt and she crumpled. She was dragged back to the room with the mattress. This time, four men raped her. They called her ‘unveiled whore’ and ‘Nusayri pig’, a sectarian insult. Days passed with more rapes. In between, she was left blindfolded, hands tied. She remembers two ropes, one green, one brown. She grew very weak.
>>533049345One day, the men ordered Samira and the older woman to go down the stairs and sit on the bare concrete floor. They told the older woman, ‘No one paid for you’ and shot her in the chest, a single bullet from a Kalashnikov. Somehow, the woman remained sitting upright, her legs slightly splayed, blood gushing from her chest. The men told Samira: ‘Say your prayers.’ She threw herself to the ground, fingertips touching their boots, begging for her life. ‘I was shaking all over.’‘I know all children follow social media influencers, but Robert Jenrick?’But they didn’t kill her. They told her to lay down and they collected some of the other woman’s blood in a bucket. They poured blood on the ground next to Samira’s head and they took pictures, apparently to fake her death. That evening, she understood why. An older man arrived, in his sixties, and the others called him ‘emir’ or prince. She had to shower and dress and he made her turn around, inspecting her. Then he handed the men a suitcase full of cash. She had been sold.The emir gave Samira a black niqab to wear and took her to sit in the back of a Range Rover. Pointing to a pistol on his hip, he said: ‘If you make a move on the road, I’ll shoot you.’ She begged him to say what was going to happen to her. ‘I saved your life,’ he replied. ‘They were going to kill you like that other woman. I paid for you. You belong to me. It will be like I am your husband; you will do everything I say.’She stayed with him in a house somewhere in the northern province of Idlib. She did not want to speak about that period, just saying: ‘I wish I had died before I went there.’ He seemed to be someone important: officials visited his home; he was never stopped at checkpoints. She managed to convince him that she had accepted her fate and he let her call her family. They had already held a funeral for her after seeing the photos posted on social media.
>>533049419After that Samira was taken to Lebanon, smuggled across the border. The emir kept her in another house watched over by an older woman and a young man who seemed to be his relatives. He often travelled on business, threatening to behead her whole family in Syria if she tried to escape. Though she was terrified, she eventually screwed up the courage to steal a key and sneak out of the house while he was away. The emir called Samira’s parents to say he would kill them unless she came back to him. She remains in hiding. As she told me, she is ‘thrilled’ with her new freedom but ‘crippled’ with fear.I was introduced to Samira by an activist named Inana Barakat. She is outside Syria but talking to the families affected, often after seeing anguished appeals for help posted on Facebook or X. She has counted 56 abductions of women and girls. Twenty-five were returned to their families, most after being raped, she says. The rest are still missing. She tells me that ten of the victims are under 18, the youngest 15, the oldest 55. She talks of sabaya, female captives held as sex slaves according to the jihadi interpretation of sharia. Families are keeping their daughters home from school, she tells me. ‘They are living in a state of fear.’There are claims of other cases. A 23-year-old woman, travelling with her 11-month-old son, disappeared while waiting on the street for a taxi. Nothing has been heard from her since. A 29-year-old housewife, married with children, disappeared after going to a hospital appointment. Ten days later, her family got an audio message from her. She sounded strange. ‘I’m out of the country and married. Don’t ask about me and don’t worry about me.’
>>533049480The historic practice of taking female slaves was reintroduced by Isis during the brief rule of the ‘Caliphate’ in Syria a decade ago. Thousands of women and girls from the Yazidi minority were held and openly traded in slave markets. I interviewed two sisters in their teens who had been kidnapped by their father’s gardener, who enjoyed their humiliation. A woman in her forties told me she had been bought by a man too poor to own a car and who had wanted a servant. He and his wife turned her out when she got cancer. There were many such stories.The group that now rules Syria, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, never took slaves. But there are almost certainly former Isis loyalists in its ranks. Occasionally a fighter in one of the militias backing the government is spotted still wearing an Isis patch. It may also be that common criminals are opportunistically taking advantage of chaos in Syria. It was a question during the Syrian uprising – as kidnapping and looting spread – whether criminals joined some of the armed groups, or if some of the armed groups turned to crime. It was probably a bit of both.Human-rights activists say the police often don’t want to investigate when an Alawite woman or girl disappears, or they try to blame the immediate family. In some cases, girls have posted videos saying they ran away to get married. The authorities point to these videos as evidence that no crime has been committed; the activists say the girls are being coerced. The activists say that all kinds of violence are continuing against the Alawites. One posted a video of a restaurant being attacked by bearded gunmen for selling alcohol. They fear the future in Syria is Islamist and authoritarian.
>>533048072>>>/news/1505706
>>533049620In Afghanistan, the Taliban Mark 2 returned to power promising a new, more liberal version of rule by sharia. Now they are as hardline as ever. In Syria, the international community is giving President al-Sharaa’s new government the benefit of the doubt for the time being. He was put into power by a wide coalition of armed groups. His government may be too weak to protect the Alawites; some of his men may not want to. Can’t or won’t? For the families whose wives or daughters were taken, it makes little difference which.
>>523386653
Israeli Jewish men gang raped Palestinian Arab women and girls>>533009950http://web.archive.org/web/20260412083934/https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/i-wished-death-sexual-violence-israels-prisons-organised-state-policy‘I wished for death’: Sexual violence in Israel’s prisons is an ‘organised state policy’Palestinian testimonies reveal how sexual violence, including rape using objects and dogs, is approved by 'highest levels' of Israeli leadershipBy Katherine HearstPublished date: 11 April 2026 11:53 BSTSexual torture of Palestinian detainees from Gaza in Israeli prisons is an "organised state policy", endorsed by the "highest, political, military, and judicial authorities", a new report has revealed.The report, seen exclusively by Middle East Eye, is based on testimonies from Palestinian former prisoners gathered by the rights watchdog Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.It reveals how the scope of sexual violence of Palestinian prisoners, including rape using objects and trained military dogs, constitutes an "organised state policy", aided and abetted by Israeli institutions and leadership.One former detainee, a 42-year-old woman from north Gaza who was held in the notorious Sde Teiman detention centre, said she was bound naked to a metal table and repeatedly raped by two masked soldiers over the course of two days.She recalled that she was left shackled, naked and bleeding throughout the night before the soldiers returned the next day to continue raping her.She said she wished for death and likened her experience to "another genocide behind walls".Throughout her ordeal, she was filmed. Soldiers later showed her the footage while she was hung by her wrists under interrogation, threatening to publish the videos if she did not "cooperate".>>>/news/1505511
>>533052944Rape by Israeli Zionists underreported due to shame cultureIsraeli Jewish Zionists raped Palestinian girls in the 1948 war and consistently raped Palestinian female and male detainees in prisons right up to now but the majority of the rapes are kept hidden and quiet due to honor shame culture.Their husbands would divorce them if they found out they were raped or if they were unmarried no one would marry them if they knew they were raped so they lied and kept quiet about the rapes.https://archive.is/9Y8jnhttps://thebarchive.com/b/thread/859561792https://archived.moe/b/thread/859561792Same thing happens in other societies with the same religion.https://www.hrw.org/news/2000/01/19/rape-allegations-surface-chechnyaThis is supposed to preserve honor but instead it leads to literal cucking especially when the married women give birth to the rape babies. They should admit they were raped instead of cucking their husbands.Since they underreported rapes on Palestinian women, Israeli Zionist Jews have been bragging they have the "most moral army in the world" and they "never rape women".https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-palestinian-woman-says-israeli-cop-raped-her-where-are-suspects-1.5629928Actually revealing these rapes in public would generate extreme anger against Zionist Jews instead of hiding them due to shame culture.https://x.com/briantashman/status/2043012698946883988https://x.com/yarahawari/status/2043027241135726789https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/2042973388990230814https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/i-wished-death-sexual-violence-israels-prisons-organised-state-policyhttps://www.middleeasteye.net/news/i-wished-death-sexual-violence-israels-prisons-organised-state-policy?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Social_Traffic&utm_content=ap_g7xxrey6yzhttps://archive.ph/Qm0Eo
