By early 2012, reports began emerging of mass rape in Syria, on both sides of the conflict. In January, the International Rescue Committee’s report included surveys from Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan identifying rape as ‘the primary reason their families fled the country’. The number two in charge at the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, using the IRC report, claimed: ‘Syria is increasingly marked by rape and sexual violence.’
While the crimes have been cited by both sides of the conflict, they seem to be perpetrated predominantly by President Bashar al-Assad’s men, largely paramilitary agents known as Shabiha, or ‘ghosts’.
Although Assad’s own government troops were not always the perpetrators, the Shabiha did most of the dirty work when it came to sexual violence. Their tactics were largely to incite fear within communities – to enter towns or villages after the government troops had been fighting nearby, and spread the word that they would rape the women – daughters, mothers, cousins and nieces. Frightened, people would run, leaving scorched earth behind. It’s a convenient way to ethnically cleanse an entire region. Fear can be generated so easily.
Sexual violence was not reported to be only against women either. There are many accounts of male rape, particularly in detention. Although prisons and detention centres were usually the most likely places for the crime to occur, it happened at checkpoints and when houses were being ‘cleansed’ as well.
Following the IRC report, videos began appearing on YouTube, as well as on Twitter and blogs, translating confessions of various captured Shabiha. The danger of such confessions is that some – such as that of the admitted rapist below – could not be verified as not having been given under great duress.
But the testimony given by a captured Shabiha is still chilling documentation.
Question: How long have you been with the security forces?
Response: Since the beginning of the revolution.
Question: What is your aim?
Response: To quash the revolution.
Question: And what else?
Response: We were induced by a certain amount of money.
Question: How much?
Response: Fifteen thousand Syrian pounds.
Question: Weekly? Monthly?
Response: Monthly.
Question: Do you go out to carry out raids?
Response: I go out on a security purpose.
Question: On a security purpose?
Response: Indeed, on a security purpose.
Question: With the army?
Response: Yes, and we raid the houses on the basis we are the security forces.
Question: Security forces?
Response: Indeed. We enter the houses to search. If there are men we push them out of the houses for a few hours. We take all the money and jewels we find. And if there are women, we rape them.
Question: How many women did you rape?
Response: Seven cases of rape.
Question: Seven?
Response: Indeed.
Question: Where did these rapes happen?
Response: Some at the village Al Fawl. First cases at the school, we raped them for six continuous hours. Then we entered another house as security forces on the ground that there are terrorists inside. We entered the house, we have tied the man, stolen jewels and money, and we raped women. One of them is from Knissat Bani Az. And we were four to rape her (me and three shabiha) and she committed suicide following her rape. The other case is a girl, we entered to search her house as security forces and we have stolen money and raped her. And there is another rape in Damascus. We entered her house on the ground we are security forces elements. We entered the house and raped the girl.
Question: And who did you deliver to the army?
Response: Five names.
Question: And who are the security forces you are dealing with?
Response: Lieutenant Colonel —.
Question: Who else?
Response: Two elements.
Question: Who is —?
Response: From the coast [the ‘coast’ being the Latakia region].
Whether or not rape is being used in Syria as a weapon of war needs to be further examined, but certainly it is a fear-provoking strategy. In February 2013, a United Nations report3 for the Commission of Inquiry on Syria (COI) at the Human Rights Council stated: ‘Syrian refugees . . . reported that one of the reasons that families fled was because of a perceived increased risk of kidnapping and rape.’
The findings below (from the same UN COI report) were based on forty-one interviews connected with sexual violence against men and women.
Between twenty and thirty soldiers and Shabiha – who she knew by name and who she described as ‘Shias’ from her village – entered her house looking for the men. Her aunt, three female cousins and three sisters-in-law were in the house, while the men were hiding in the basement. They beat the elderly aunt when she told them the men were in Lebanon. One of the Shabiha took two of her cousins upstairs to a separate room and locked the door while the others stayed downstairs. After the Shabiha left, the two stated that they had been beaten but she noticed the cousins couldn’t walk properly afterwards and couldn’t explain why they were separated from the rest if they had only been beaten.
While rape in any society is a horrific act of power and subjugation, in Muslim culture, it is devastating. Notions of virginity uphold the central concept of honour in Islam, not only for the victim, but also for the family. The COI reports cited five cases of women who had committed suicide after being raped. The crime was against women as young as fourteen.
‘Sexual violence in Syria is not systematic – it’s not like Rwanda where it was meant to wipe out a gene pool,’ said Dr Zahra, a Syrian gynaecologist I met in 2013 on the Turkish-Syrian border who was working extensively with rape victims. ‘But it is happening. It is happening every day.’ There were an estimated 9,500 Syrians living in Antakya, where I saw Dr Zahra, at that time, after having fled their country.
‘Not every woman who is arrested has been raped. Not all the women whose houses were raided were raped.’ Zahra pauses. ‘But the ones who have been are deeply traumatized.’
The girl had been abducted from the street by four men, two in military uniforms and two in civilian clothing. She was taken to an unknown building where she was kept and questioned by people she described as ‘Shias from her neighbourhood’. While there she was interrogated by a woman about the work her mother did with the FSA [Free Syrian Army, the opposition].
During the interrogation, she was beaten with electrical wire, given injections . . . and had cigarettes extinguished on her chest. She was denied food and water for extended periods of time. On the fifth day of her detention, four young men were brought into the room, where they raped her. Two days later, she was released.
Her father took her to a gynaecologist outside Syria. In a separate interview, the doctor confirmed bruises, cigarette burns, injection marks on arms, and sexual injuries to the victim. This 14-year-old girl has tried to commit suicide three times, saying ‘My life has no value. I lost everything, what has gone will never come back.’
United Nations COI report, February 2013
Nada’s time had come.
The police (or perhaps the secret service or intelligence, she was not sure who they were) entered the room, sat down and looked at her as though she were a dog. One said abruptly: ‘Talk or we will strip you!’
Nada, however, remained huddled on the floor, shaking with terror. ‘I was like one of those little dogs, you know the kind that shake and shake and cannot stop shaking?’
She had never thought this would happen to her, never considered the potential consequences if she got caught working with the opposition. ‘I just did it. I did not think – maybe I did not let myself think – of what could happen.’
Still, Nada did not cry, at least not at first. She just lay on the ground wishing she were dead.
Eight months and three days is a horrifically long
time to be held captive and tortured. And the pain wasn’t just physical. Perhaps the worst part was that her jailers delighted in telling her that her family had been notified she was dead.
In fact, Nada spent her days and nights in a dirty cell not far from her childhood home, but the people she loved most in the world were grieving for her. They believed her body was no longer of this earth. She felt invisible. She felt alone. The psychological torture was more terrifying than the physical abuse.
‘To think that the outside world, the people that love you think you are dead when in fact you are alive . . .’
A small, dark cell became Nada’s home for eight months. Nada’s cell was not even big enough for her already small frame to stretch out in; she remained curled up. The jeans she wore throughout the entire ordeal are still creased in the areas of her body which she was unable to move.
‘I kept them,’ she says. ‘To remember what they did to me.’
In one corner of the cell, there was a hole – an Arabic toilet – and a water tap. ‘I kept the water running all the time because I was afraid of rats coming up the drainpipe and biting me.’ She could not sleep, and when she did, she dreamed of those same rats covering her body. She would wake up crying and screaming, clutching her body to protect herself from the imaginary rodents.
Other men and women were kept in the cells next to her own. She did not know who they were, but they too would scream out, crying, pleading for mercy, for an end to the torture. Some cried for their mothers.
‘This was part of my torture,’ she says. ‘To hear other people begging, and to know they were coming for me next. When they would stop in front of my door and turn the key – my heart would stop.’
She tried to keep track of time, but it was impossible as her body wasted away. She imagined herself disappearing. Her family too. She had no news of them, nor of her friends, nor of her other captured colleagues. They told her that other activists had betrayed her, that Assad had won the war, and that the opposition was dead. ‘I sank into a dark place.’
When she asked for water, they would bring a male prisoner, make him urinate into a bottle, and try to force her to drink it. When she spat it out, they would throw it back in her face. The male prisoner, equally humiliated, would avoid her eyes.
‘I remember every single one of their faces,’ she says bitterly of her tormentors, of that memory. ‘I will look for them. I AM looking for them.’
The stripping led to beatings. The beatings led to further abuse.
She was relentlessly interrogated for names, dates and occasions where she met her fellow Syrian Youth Union colleagues.
There was always at least one interrogator, sometimes more. She would sit; they would circle her like wolves.
She was continually threatened with rape.
‘They would say “Talk or we will strip you”,’ she says, covering her eyes with the swipe of a hand. ‘That was their line, their threat.’
One day, when she was not telling them what they wanted to hear, they brought her to an all-male cell where the prisoners were in their underwear.
The men stared at her lustfully. She was one of them, but they were men, and they had been locked up a long time.
‘It was horrible,’ she says. ‘Humiliating. They told me they would leave me with these hungry men and they would take care of me.’ She felt like a rabbit surrounded by wolves.
‘I am a conservative Muslim woman, I thought I was being given to these men for them to rape me,’ she said. ‘And so I started screaming. I think I screamed for three hours. Until my throat was stripped raw. They wanted to break me. And they did. Finally, I said, “Okay, I will tell you the truth”.’
She said she talked. She told them things. But what she told them was not enough. After several hours, they moved her – the first of many moves – and brought her to a place that she calls ‘the horror room’. The room was only as wide as ‘a man’s body’. They tied her hands to an iron bar behind her back.
Then a man entered with a whip. ‘Every time I said something he did not like,’ she says, beginning to break into sobs, ‘he whipped me.’
Her bloodied and bruised body was then handed over to another interrogator, who was told, ‘Okay, now really take care of her.’
‘Now the real beatings began,’ she says sombrely, ‘and the terrible things.’
For more than four years, I roamed refugee camps, safe houses, cities and towns in Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq, talking to women who had been raped during the war. Initially I did it as a journalist and analyst; later I worked for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) working on reports about Syrian women who were left alone owing to the war, and were susceptible to sexual predation.
They were hard to find, these women, for most direct victims did not wish to talk with me. I often had to rely on friends or family, who would whisper about such-and-such a woman, and I would do my best to track them down. I never forced them to talk, and if they did not want to see me, I did not push them. I believed they had suffered enough.
Eventually, working near the Turkish–Syrian border in 2013, I was told about a ‘safe’ house in Northern Syria, near Aleppo, where nearly a dozen women were hiding. All had allegedly been raped by Shabiha, and were being tended to and cared for by a religious woman. But when I finally tracked the safe house down, they had moved – the women were not safe, and they had gone to another village.
Once I had identified the victims, and if they agreed to talk to me, I still had to decipher their language of shame. I tried to explain that I was not going to identify them or expose their terrible secret, and that speaking might, in some way, eventually bring the perpetrators to justice. That was the singular motive of the women – and the men – who agreed to talk to me: that the men who had done this to them would not be able to walk the streets when the war was finished, with impunity. Some told me they spoke to me because hiding their story was like a ‘stone weighing down my heart’, as one young girl said tearfully.
Many years before, I had had a similar task in Bosnia and Kosovo. Following those wars, the women were often held in ‘rape camps’ for weeks or even months, and would not use the word ‘rape’ in their own language. They would say – between sobs – that they had been ‘touched’. They would cry, saying that if their husbands knew, they would divorce them to find a clean woman. They covered up their secret like a bloody wound, and told no one.
The taboo of rape for any woman is enormous. But for a Muslim woman, who is meant to be a virgin upon marriage, it is the end of life, or the life she was meant to live. If she was single before, she will probably never marry. She will not have children, a family. In other cultures, this might be fine; but in the Middle East, where large families are a given, it means isolation from the rest of society.
Later, Yazidi women, from an ancient community in northern Iraq, would report being kidnapped by ISIS soldiers, sold into slavery, held in houses, raped, forced to marry their captors. The sexual violence used against women during the war that rages through Syria (and later, Iraq, when ISIS pushed through the town of Mosul and began to erase the borders between Syria and Iraq) is a way of fighting the men themselves: if we cannot fuck you, we will fuck your women.
Most of the rapes I was able to document were committed in detention. Some happened at checkpoints. Other women were raped in their homes, when the Shabiha entered their villages.
The women who were held in detention report that rape was always the threat used when they were not ‘cooperating’. One young woman said that she was imprisoned with her mother and forced to watch the soldiers beating her mother.
‘I did not care what they did to me,’ she said, ‘but to see my mother suffering . . .’ The soldiers threatened to rape her mother, before telling the mother that they were going to rape the daughter.
‘This was the most terrible psychological pressure. I do not think you can imagine the pain . . .’
Ano
ther young woman in Aleppo told me she was arrested for putting up revolutionary posters. She was partially stripped, blindfolded and tied to a chair.
‘Then they said they would pass me from man to man.’
When I met Nada in a safe house in southern Turkey, she had been out of prison for some months. But she still had the reflexes of a prisoner, of someone huddling in a corner, protecting her face and her body from blows. Sudden movements made her jump; she would frequently get lost in her thoughts, and stay silent for several minutes, or well up with tears.
She was minuscule in size, thinner than when she had entered prison, which made it hard for me to believe that anyone could beat her with a stick or a whip. She looked as though she would break in two if you touched her. Her body was the size of a twelve-year-old: no breasts, no hips, shoulders hardly wide enough to carry her frame. She wore a lavender hijab and a tight red sweater. The childish clash of colours seemed to emphasize how young she looked.
When we first met, she cowered when I touched her hand in greeting. She seemed broken, vulnerable. She would not use the word rape. She told her story in staccato. But after a while of sitting quietly, her face changed into a myriad of emotions – sadness, pain, then the heavy flood of memory, and finally revulsion. She told of the day they brought in a male prisoner and forced her to watch him being sodomized. As she talks, her voice deadened, she opens and closes her hand mechanically, clutching at the straps of her backpack. She starts to cry. It very quickly turns to a raw sobbing.
‘The things I saw . . . the things I saw . . .’ she spits out. ‘It is unbearable to explain what I saw . . . I cannot forget . . . I saw . . . another prisoner being raped . . . a man being raped. I heard it . . . I saw it . . . Do you know what it’s like to hear a man cry?’
She abruptly gets up from the chair where she is sitting, claps a hand over her mouth, and runs into a nearby bathroom. She turns on the tap and begins to vomit.
A friend, who is with her, is also close to tears.
The Morning They Came for Us Page 3