Mick Hartley

Paul Wood in the Spectator: 

Syria’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.

Assad, of course, was Alawite – an offshoot of Shia Islam – so it's no surprise that, with Turkish-backed Sunnis now running Syria, revenge is in the air. And, as so often in Islam, it's usually women who suffer the most.

The bulk of the article describes the nightmare ordeal of "Samira", who was abducted off the street, gang-raped, and sold into a forced marriage. What's notable is how her captors and rapists clearly saw themselves as devout Muslims, with some sporting black headbands with the first part of the Shahada in white script: ‘There is no god but God’, while cursing her as an  ‘unveiled whore’.

The 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….

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.

In 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.