'Drugged, raped, impregnated,' Alawite women recount kidnappings in the new Syria
Abductions of women and girls from Syria’s Alawite minority are “more common, and more brutal,” than Syria’s extremist-led government has acknowledged, a New York Times (NYT) investigation published on 3 April has found.
In November, the Syrian government, led by former ISIS commander Ahmad al-Sharaa, denied that Alawite women and girls are being abducted, claiming that in dozens and dozens of cases, they had run away from home to be with lovers.
However, Syrian activists have confirmed the details of nearly 100 Alawite girls who have been abducted, including many who were taken following the government’s massacre of at least 1,600 Alawite civilians in March 2025.
In its new report, NYT verified the kidnappings of 13 Alawite women and girls, one man, and one boy. Five of the females had been raped, and two became pregnant before being released.
NYT described the case of a 16-year-old girl who disappeared after leaving her home to visit a shop last May.
Weeks later, an anonymous caller contacted her family, saying that he had the teenage girl and would release her if they paid thousands of dollars in ransom.
After the family paid the ransom, the girl was finally returned by her abductors following 100 days in captivity.
The girl said she had been held in a dark basement where she was regularly drugged with sleeping pills and raped by strangers.
After a medical exam upon her return, she discovered she was pregnant.
In November, an investigation by The Cradle found that the government has tried to hide the abductions of Alawite women through well-coordinated public relations campaigns that included forcing abducted women and girls to make social media videos claiming they had voluntarily run away from their families to marry the extremist Sunni men who had in fact abducted them.
The NYT investigation found that in one case, the family of an abducted woman sent $17,000 to kidnappers to secure her release. However, her captors never freed her.
In another case confirmed by NYT, a 24-year-old woman was abducted and 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.” She was released after her relatives paid the kidnappers a ransom.
Syrian activists have confirmed scores of such kidnappings, but details are difficult to confirm because victims and their families are often too terrified to talk.
Most people who spoke with the NYT did so anonymously for fear of reprisals from the government or the kidnappers.
Many of the kidnapped women and girls and their families who spoke to NYT also said the government did not take their cases seriously.
“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,” the NYT wrote, noting that many of the kidnappers were foreigners who came to fight against the Syrian government during the war that began in 2011. These foreigners have since been incorporated into Sharaa's new security forces.
One woman recalled how her four captors asked her whether she was Alawite. After she replied, “Yes,” they told her they were “going to have a good time.”
“They wanted to humiliate the Alawites,” she said.
Sharaa’s government denied in November that Alawite women were being kidnapped, despite a report from Amnesty International in July and a report from a UN commission in August that documented dozens of abductions.
“Some security officers told the families of those who had returned to lie about what had happened,” NYT wrote. One woman who was abducted, Walaa Ismael, said that after she was released, 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.”
The Syrian Justice Archive (SJA) documented the most recent case of an abducted Alawite girl.
Seventeen-year-old Ghazal Hani Naaous was abducted on 1 April while returning home in the village of Barmya in Baniyas countryside from a private tutoring session.
So far, the girl’s family has received no calls or any information about her whereabouts.
Alawites have been targeted for kidnapping and killing after President Sharaa’s armed group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), came to power in Damascus in December 2024.
HTS is a former Al-Qaeda affiliate that promotes extremist Salafist ideology, in which Alawites and other religious minorities are viewed as apostates who deserve to be killed or enslaved.
Despite this, Sharaa and his government enjoy strong backing from the US and European countries. Earlier this week, the self-proclaimed Syrian president was warmly welcomed by western leaders in the UK and Germany.
HTS previously received support from the US, Israeli, Turkish, Qatari, and Saudi intelligence as part of Operation Timber Sycamore to topple the former Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/world/middleeast/syria-kidnapping-alawite-woman-girls.html
https://thecradle.co/articles/syrias-mukhtariyah-massacre-and-the-lie-that-made-it-possible