Noha Swied
In a damp cell in the Palestine Branch, Hajar had chosen a corner for herself where she could weep in silence—no one heard her except those packed beside her in that cramped space. One night, I woke to the sound of her sobbing. I asked what could still be hurting her after all the humiliation, beatings, and threats she had endured. She answered in a faint, broken voice:
“I’m not afraid of what they did to me. I’m afraid of what will be said about me when I get out.”
Neither torture nor interrogation had broken her will. What crushed her resolve and terrified her was a single accusation: jihad al-nikah. “If I get out,” she told me, her voice trembling, “that accusation will cling to me like a shadow. It will follow me in official institutions and in people’s eyes. In the law they call it prostitution; in the collective memory it’s an unforgivable stain.”
On the other side of Syria’s coast, Layla—seventeen years old—would go to school every morning in Latakia. On an entirely ordinary day, she left home and never returned. Layla was kidnapped… Her family searched for hours, then days, then fell silent. A week later, a ready-made story appeared on a TV channel and on social media, telling us that this innocent child, the daughter of a modest Alawite family, had run away with her lover, with whom she had supposedly been involved months earlier. That was enough for people. The story ended before it began. No one ever knew what truly happened, but everyone memorized the accusation, reducing the girl’s life to a hastily uttered sentence that stole her reputation; and if she were to return home, she would return burdened not with what happened to her, but with what was said about her.
Once again, women become instruments in political propaganda and contests for power and spoils, just as in ancient times, when their subjugation was legitimized in the name of guardianship and virtue. The idea is the same. Under Assad’s rule, women became tools for humiliating and subduing society; today, the new ruling authority revives the very same tactic with its ready-made accusations—even if the era, the discourse, and the religious and political references have changed. The mechanism remains identical: strike the opposing community at its most vulnerable point—women’s honor; subdue society through a stain so wide and so devastating that no one can refute it, even if it is a lie. It needs no evidence and no truth to become permanently lodged in collective consciousness. The slogans may differ, the language may shift, but the exploitation is one and the same. Women— their lives, their fate—remain the casualties of political struggle, and social fear is reforged in the harshest and most degrading ways.
In the same cell, I spoke with Umm Muhammad, a woman in her seventies from rural Quneitra. I asked her what she had been accused of. She answered with a painful innocence and simplicity:
“Jihad al-liqaḥ, my daughter—that’s what they said. I don’t even know what it means.”
She did not understand the term, nor where the interrogator had dredged it from, nor for what purpose it had been invented.
As for Maha, a nurse from Idlib, the wife of a doctor who belonged neither to the loyalist nor to the opposition camps: after the Free Syrian Army took control of the area where her husband worked, he became afraid to travel home for fear of arrest, so she used to visit him instead. She too was arrested—under the same accusation. Many women like her were abducted from roads and checkpoints. No one knows where they are. And once they reached the detention center, the accusation awaited them in advance: jihad al-nikah.
After the 2011 uprising and the transformations and war that followed, the Assad regime invested heavily in this accusation, promoting it as a moral weapon aimed at opposition women or women from socially pro-uprising communities—even when they had played no political role. Through its media, the regime portrayed Islamist factions as recruiting women for sexual services under a religious cover, to provide “comfort” to fighters and strengthen their resistance. The real purpose was to defame the opponent—religiously and morally—by accusing it of violating the honor of “its” women, in order to provoke a conservative social imagination that sees such behavior as an unforgivable fall.
But the most painful part was not the jailer’s brutality nor the hardness of the walls—it was that segment of Syrians who embraced this accusation without hesitation, who believed a cheap, vulgar rumor and turned it into legal truth and proof of guilt. A simple statement on Syrian state TV or a yellow newspaper was enough to turn any woman into an accused criminal in the eyes of an entire society. The court needed only the regime’s narrative to rule; the people were eager to raise their fingers in accusation.
And yet yesterday feels distant—and frighteningly close. Today, the new “Sharia-based” authority reenacts the same script with another face, through its systematic denial of the kidnapping of Syrian women, especially Alawite women. It appears on its channels to say these women “ran off with their lovers” or “got involved in suspicious activities,” robbing the victims of their right to safety, innocence, and even grief. And the painful part is that many still believe it—adopting the authority’s narrative without question, denying the reality of systematic abduction, transforming pain, disappearance, and fear into a charge and a disgrace hung solely around the necks of women.
With the massive waves of Syrian displacement and the spread of camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, acute social and economic fragility emerged, placing women and girls in particular in positions vulnerable to exploitation and coercion. International human rights organizations documented cases of forced marriage and the selling or trading of women in exchange for food or shelter—what became known as “food-for-sex marriages,” a form of unequal relationship classified under international law as a type of human trafficking. The absence of legal protection inside the camps and weak institutional oversight allowed relatives or powerful individuals to commit such exploitation without deterrence.
Alongside this, an escalating extremist religious discourse sought to legitimize these practices by selectively invoking historical concepts like milk al-yamin and wrenching them out of their jurisprudential and historical context, claiming that men have the right to “own” women who lack male providers in exchange for food and clothing. Some clerics even went so far as to claim that men could hold large numbers of such women without marriage or legal safeguards.
The concepts of sabi (female captives) and milk al-yamin were among the most prominent historical examples that framed women as spoils of war. In Islamic legal heritage, the enslavement of women in wartime was codified, granting men the right to own a captive and have sexual access to her without marriage. Although modern human-rights frameworks have transcended such practices and the concepts that enabled them, the absence of deep structural critique of their legislative origins allowed them to persist in religious discourse as part of a “legitimate heritage.” Worse yet, these texts are invoked practically whenever an ideology needs to reinforce male authority or justify violence, relying on a supposed historical legitimacy rooted in divine sanction—despite the clear incompatibility of such utilitarian use with contemporary Islamic jurisprudence, international human-rights norms, and anti-trafficking conventions.
It is no surprise, then, that this distorted heritage becomes a pretext for rogue actors and organized groups to justify abducting Syrian women of different sects and treating them as captives to be “owned,” as seen in the kidnapping of Alawite women in several cities and in the abduction of Druze women during the invasion of Sweida. When these historical tools are summoned into the present conflict, they become a sword at the necks of women—violating their dignity and their lives under the guise of false religious legitimacy.
It is hardly surprising that the new authority, with its well-known jihadist background, denies the abduction of women altogether and casts the victims as culprits, hurling moral accusations at them to legitimize the practice of kidnapping rather than criminalize it. As though this authority and its leaders are exacting some kind of revenge for what Assad’s regime once committed in the name of the Alawite sect—even though Alawites themselves were among the most harmed by his rule. Is the Damascus authority today enacting a form of retaliation against the Alawite community by violating its women—or using kidnapped Druze women as political bargaining chips to wound the dignity of the Druze community? The previous regime arrested many Sunni women of the uprising and hurled at them the accusation of “jihad al-nikah,” a concept linked to ISIS extremism and wholly incompatible with real Islamic ethics. Today, the Sharia authority reproduces the same exploitative pattern, with changed victims and communities, using religious texts—stripped of context—to justify domination and control.
A few days ago, a Syrian writer coined the term “al-Qaeda feminists,” referring to some Syrian feminists who now support this jihadist-leaning authority— the same authority that violates women’s rights, restricts their freedoms, and enslaves them sexually. These feminists suddenly reversed their positions: when that same authority ruled Idlib, they issued daily statements and condemnations—from the smallest infractions to the gravest abuses—raising their voices tirelessly against jihadist violations, backed by local and international rights organizations. Their presence then was a sign of resisting repression and defending vulnerable women.
But once the authority moved to Damascus, everything changed. Their voices became unconditional endorsements. They are now either justifying, colluding, or remaining silent in the face of ongoing violations against women from other sects. Some even exploit their professional positions to defend the authority in hopes of earning more trust from it and its supporters. It is terrifying and degrading to the historical image of Syrian women that those who once defended women’s rights—journalists, lawyers, politicians—have turned into auxiliary forces for the authority, helping scatter justice and deepen women’s humiliation. A double humiliation—for Syrian women, and an immense betrayal.
In some respects, they resemble the former Women’s Union that supported Assad’s rule—but in a more grotesque and disgraceful form. They have dedicated their existence to supporting a power that shuts every door in women’s faces, violates the bodies of other women, and marginalizes their political and social participation at a time when they should be guardians of rights and freedoms.
Syrian women remain witnesses to their wounds, burdened with a shame in which they had no hand, besieged by a silence perpetuated by the near and the far alike. Their bodies remain mirrors to male battles they never chose and were never partners in—yet they bear their full consequences, carrying their memories as undeniable testimony that human dignity can be stripped away when everyone colludes in violating it.
