Not only are the Syrian state's new rulers complicit in a wave of abductions targeting Alawite women, but they are also orchestrating a chilling campaign to erase the evidence.
The Cradle's Syria Correspondent
The campaign includes forcing women like Mira Jalal Thabet, Lana Ahmed, Nagham Issa, and Mai Salim Saloum to appear in staged videos aired by pro-government outlets, claiming their disappearances were voluntary. The goal is to gaslight families, erase evidence, and shut down media investigations.
The government ‘investigates’ kidnappings
“There is no, so to speak, ‘phenomenon of women being abducted in the Syrian coast,’” Interior Ministry spokesman Noureddin al-Baba told pro-government Levant 24 on 2 November.
“Genuine abductions are very rare. But the abundance of fake kidnapping reports has overshadowed the real ones.”
He claimed that after the ministry investigated 42 alleged abductions of Alawite women, it found just one confirmed case.
However, the ministry spokesman’s claims ignored dozens of cases of kidnappings confirmed by human rights groups and international and local media since Sharaa took power almost one year ago, including by the UN Commission of Inquiry, Reuters, Amnesty International, Al-Daraj, The Spectator, and The Cradle.
The case of Mira Jalal Thabet
Levant 24 pointed to two alleged cases of “fake kidnappings,” namely those of Mira Jalal Thabet and Nagham Issa.
Mira Jalal Thabet lived with her parents in the village of Al-Makhtabiya, in the Telkalakh countryside, Homs Governorate.
She had been attending a course at the Teachers’ Training Institute in Homs city. However, according to Mira’s father, she was not allowed to travel to the city to attend the courses due to the poor security situation after the fall of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last year.
Mira’s father explained, however, that a woman claiming to work at the institute contacted him and his wife by phone, encouraging them to allow Mira to take the final exam. The woman insisted that Mira’s father bring her to the institute on Sunday, 27 April, for this purpose.
Mira’s father agreed, and on that day, drove her to the institute. Strangely, the security guards refused to let him enter the building, so he waited outside for Mira to complete the test. But Mira never came out of the building.
Mira’s panicked parents reported her disappearance, accusing the institute staff of involvement in her kidnapping. The staff later claimed that they had never spoken with Mira’s parents, nor asked them to bring her to take the test. But Mira’s father said this was impossible, as the woman who called them had detailed information about Mira as a student at the institute.
Mira reappeared in her village two weeks later, on 8 May, under strange circumstances. Photos showed her wearing an Afghan-style burqa, being escorted by armed men, and getting pulled by the wrist by a man claiming to be her new husband.
The photos of Mira went viral among Syrians on social media, highlighting the issue of the kidnapping of Alawite women and creating a public relations problem for the new government.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) stated that a “state of broad public anger” prevailed across Syria over Mira’s case, amid reports she had been handed over to an armed group in Homs and her father arrested.
Mira’s case appeared to be a “clear transformation from a kidnapping case to a ‘consensual marriage’ under security protection,” the rights group wrote.
The cover-up
However, media outlets and journalists affiliated with the government in Damascus soon launched a media campaign to claim she had not been kidnapped but had voluntarily run away to marry a young Sunni man she had loved for years.
A video was released on 9 May showing a journalist working for the state-run Al Ekhbariya TV channel, Amir Abdulbaky, interviewing Mira in her home.
She is seated on the couch alongside her alleged husband, a young man named Ahmed. The journalist Abdulbaky, who has 250,000 followers on Facebook, first turns to Ahmed to ask what happened. He denies that he kidnapped Mira, saying she left her home due to family pressure, and they were married.
As Ahmed speaks, Mira very clearly appears nervous and scared. The journalist then turns to Mira, who insists that “There was no kidnapping.”
“In conclusion, why do we turn love stories into kidnappings and blackmail and circulate them inappropriately?” the journalist says, dismissing the public uproar in the process.
Though they are in Mira’s home, her parents are nowhere to be found. As noted above, the father had reportedly been arrested two days before.
No explanation is given of why she appeared scared, or where she had been for the two weeks after her disappearance, nor of why she reappeared accompanied by government security forces.
Pictures also circulated on social media showing Ahmed and the journalist Abdulbaky celebrating the fall of Assad together last December. This indicates they had a prior relationship and caused speculation that Ahmed had been recruited to pose as Mira’s husband.
During another video interview published the same day, Mira subtly pulls up the sleeve of her burqa to reveal injuries on her wrist, which appear to be deep bruises or burn marks. She does this as Ahmed is speaking, before pulling the sleeve back down again, in an apparent attempt to show she had been abused.
Another video of an interview with Mira and Ahmed in the street in Homs was released by Levant 24 a day later, allegedly to show “the true story from Mira herself,” the journalist interviewing her says.
Mira again says she was not kidnapped; however, she was not able to speak freely in any of the interviews, as she was always accompanied by Ahmed and possibly others not seen on camera.
Because she appeared much more comfortable in this video and even smiles at times, this was taken as proof she had not been kidnapped and freely chose to marry young Ahmed.
This image was reinforced by later videos, promoted by Syrian media, showing Mira and Ahmed happily shopping for clothes together and speaking akin to social media influencers.
One explanation for this is that Mira was affected by Stockholm Syndrome, where someone who is kidnapped becomes sympathetic to her kidnappers over time.
Despite this, journalist Qatiba Yassin of Syria TV used her case as “proof” that reports of Sunni extremists kidnapping Alawite girls and forcing them to marry were all fake.
“Let everyone know that there is no such thing in Syria as giving girls nor jihad al-nikah [sexual jihad]. No captivity. Not a single case has occurred from any party to the conflict since 2011 until now. These are all just accusations,” he wrote on X to his more than 500,000 followers.
Shockingly, he claimed in the same post that “Even Daesh [ISIS] had no sex slaves,” even though sexual jihad, and the ISIS practice of taking Yezidi women as sex slaves in northern Iraq, are well-documented.
Yassin then issued a veiled threat to human rights activists and journalists attempting to document kidnapping cases and asking his followers on X to report them.
“You'll try to deceive ... We will expose your lies and reveal the truth,” he wrote.
But Mira’s father continued to insist his daughter had been kidnapped, pointing the finger at members of the Teaching Institute who appeared to facilitate the abduction by convincing him to bring her for the exam.
In October, after the attention surrounding Mira had subsided, gunmen on motorcycles attacked a barbershop in Al-Mukhtabiya belonging to Mira’s father with a grenade and heavy gunfire.
The attack killed two young men, Muhammad al-Qasim and Muhi al-Din Awad, and injured Mira’s father and brother, as well as a young man named Hussein Shweiti, whose condition was critical.
Because the families of many kidnapped victims are threatened if they speak out, it is hard to believe that the attempt on Mira’s father’s life was just a coincidence.
The case of Lana Ahmed
The claim that Alawite women were simply running away to marry Sunni extremist lovers emerged again after a video of a young Alawite girl, 15-year-old Lana Ahmed, appeared online on 30 May.
In the video, Lana appears in a white hijab, walking beside a young man she had supposedly married. This time, there is no journalist present. She and the young man are making a selfie video as they walk.
“I appeared in this video to clarify that I wasn't kidnapped … All the stories circulating about my situation are false rumors. I'm speaking now without any pressure or threats,” she said.
Lana’s video came in response to a video posted to social media by her mother, Aziza, three days before.
In it, Aziza says Lana had been kidnapped and desperately pleads for the return of her daughter.
Lana had been kidnapped two months before, on 25 March, from the upscale Al-Awqaf neighborhood in the coastal city of Latakia, which had seen a wave of sectarian violence committed against the Alawite population.
The kidnappers later sent a photo of Lana showing clear signs of bruises, demanding a large sum of money from her mother in exchange for her release.
Aziza gave anonymous testimony about Lana to journalists from Al-Daraj for a 14 April report, which documented the case of 10 kidnapped women and girls. However, Aziza was initially too terrified to speak out publicly.
But Aziza changed her mind when she saw that two other kidnapped Alawite girls had been released after their mother had made a similar public plea on social media.
A friend of Lana’s family informed The Cradle that it made no sense for Lana to have run away to marry a young Sunni boy:
“She was just 15 years old, living her best life and preparing to go to Germany for university after finishing high school. She is from a relatively well-off family from a good area of Latakia. She is underage, just 15 years old. Why would she suddenly marry a conservative Muslim? The kidnappers sent a picture of her beaten face to her family. This went viral and was embarrassing, so this is why the video of Lana wearing the white hijab appeared.”
The case of Mai Salim Saloum
On the morning of 21 June, Mai Salim Saloum, a 40-year-old teacher, went missing after a dentist appointment in the city of Latakia, prompting fears she too had been kidnapped.
Two days later, her young children, two daughters and one son, posted an emotional video to Facebook asking for information about their mother. “We want you to return her to us as soon as possible. She did nothing to you. We want her back,” her crying daughter stated.
Strangely, a video circulated the next day on Facebook showing Mai sitting in a room and wearing a hijab. In the video, she says that she came to Aleppo and does not want to return to Latakia. Behind the camera is an unknown man who asks Mai if she was missing or kidnapped. She responds that she is not.
The video is short, just 29 seconds, and feels like an interrogation. Mai does not smile or suggest she is happy or well.
The man also asks if she has communicated with her brother, and she says that she has.
However, according to a relative of Mai speaking to The Cradle, Mai had not spoken with her brother or anyone from the family, and her mobile phone had been turned off since she disappeared.
“Since the time she was kidnapped, we have not heard her voice,” the relative says.
Then, in early August, Mai was brought to a police station in the Aleppo countryside, where her husband and children briefly saw her. They said she appeared deeply traumatized, and did not even recognize her own son, making them fear she had been drugged.
Days later, Mai was transferred from Aleppo to a police station in Latakia. Her family, accompanied by a lawyer, went to see her and requested a blood test and forensic examination. The Latakia Police denied the request, citing an ongoing investigation.
Her brother, Mahdi, stated in a video posted to social media that when he tried to visit her at the police station, the captain told him to leave and wait for a call in three hours. However, Mahdi insisted on bringing his sister food, and when he returned, he was surprised to find Mai was gone.
The police told him she had left as she was “an adult and free” to go wherever she wanted. He told them that the captain had asked him to wait for a call from him after three hours, so how could they send her away in that way?
Mai had been returned to Aleppo, where pro-government Zaman al-Wasl conducted an “interview” with her two days later to show that the “rumors” that she had been kidnapped were “completely false.”
She says that she had been “born again” on 21 June (the day she disappeared) and that the 43 days she had been in Aleppo with her new family had felt like living in “paradise.”
Mai denied that she had been drugged or that she had not recognized her son while in police custody. She also claimed her husband had abused her.
“My decision is final, I'm not leaving here, and I'm not going back from here to my family or my husband,” she stated.
But none of this made sense to her family. Three days later, her husband and children released a video in response.
“Mom, we miss you. We miss hugging you. We know you. We know that you were forced to say what you said,” her youngest daughter stated while sobbing and holding a picture of her mom.
“Please come back, Mom. I can't take it anymore. You said you were born on 21 June, but on that day we all died,” she said.
The case of Nagham Issa
The kidnapping issue proved particularly embarrassing to Syrian authorities on 27 June, when Reuters published a report that gained wide attention for documenting the cases of 33 abducted women, based on testimonies from the victims’ families.
The Reuters report was followed a week later, on 5 July, by an article by former BBC journalist Paul Wood in the British magazine The Spectator, which also gained wide attention.
The article documented the case of Nagham Issa, an Alawite woman who disappeared months before, on 2 February, from the Akrama neighborhood of Homs.
News of Nagham went viral five days later when a photo circulated online that appeared to show Nagham’s lifeless body covered in blood, alongside that of another unknown woman.
“A flood of misinformation” immediately spread to smear Nagham’s reputation and justify her killing, reported the Syrian fact-checking organization, Taakad.
Social media posts circulated making the bizarre claim that Nagham had been responsible for torturing “female prisoners in the prisons of the former regime.”
Takaad confirmed with Nagham’s family that she had been kidnapped and that her abductors demanded a ransom of 500 million Syrian pounds ($40,000) for her release, which her family could not pay.
Then, in March, a video circulated online showing that Nagham was, in fact, still alive. Wearing a hijab and a pink jacket, she denies that the General Security – Syria’s internal security forces – had played any role in her disappearance.
According to Alawite activist Inana Barakat, Nagham was forced to make the video by the man who sold her after her abduction, in exchange for the release of her father and brother, who had been arrested by the General Security.
However, Nagham later managed to escape after she was taken by her abductor to Lebanon. With help from the activist Barakat, Paul Wood of The Spectator was able to speak with her via WhatsApp.
Nagham told Wood that she was thrown into a van by six men wearing black balaclava masks, taken to another location, and gang-raped.
Her abductors shot and killed a separate, older woman who had also been abducted, and collected some of her blood in a bucket.
They told Nagham to lie down and poured some of the blood next to her head. They then took pictures of her and posted them online to fake her death and convince her family to give up looking for her.
Nagham’s abductors then sold her to an ‘emir’ who seemed to enjoy a high position in a Syrian armed faction affiliated with the Syrian army. The emir took her across the border to Lebanon, where he frequently traveled, keeping her captive in a home there.
After Nagham managed to escape, the emir called her parents to say he would kill them unless she came back to him.
On 6 July, the day after The Spectator report emerged, Sheikh Anas Ayrout, who holds a position on President Sharaa’s Fatwa Council, appeared live on television to insist that there are no kidnappings of Alawite women, calling any such claim a “blatant lie.”
Ayrout is well-known on the Syrian coast for leading protests against Assad early in the war and for delivering videotaped sermons inciting the killing of Alawites in the city of Baniyas.
Amnesty International and the UN confirm kidnappings
But international pressure was mounting. Days later, Sharaa announced the formation of a government committee to investigate the kidnapping claims.
On 28 July, shortly after the government announced it would begin its investigation, Amnesty International stated that it had received credible reports of at least 36 Alawite women and girls who had been abducted since February.
Cases documented by Amnesty included the abduction and kidnapping in broad daylight of five Alawite women and three Alawite girls below the age of 18. One of the victims was just three years old.
“In all but one of the documented cases, police and security officials failed to effectively investigate the women and girls’ fates and whereabouts,” Amnesty reported.
The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria issued a report two weeks later, on 11 August, confirming six cases of abductions of Alawite women, including two cases of forced marriage. The commission said it had received credible information regarding additional kidnappings as well.
It also confirmed the kidnapping of Nagham, discussing details of her case after speaking with her, but without identifying her by name.
A state-built narrative collapses
But Nagham’s case emerged again on 27 October, when Syria’s Ministry of Interior released a video showing her parents, her ex-husband, and her sister saying she had not been kidnapped, but had run away with a lover to Lebanon. They claimed she had been paid to stage the kidnapping and then told the false story to the UN and Amnesty to amplify it.
Syria TV journalist Qatib Yassin used the video of Nagham’s family members to again claim that all the kidnapping cases were simply fabricated.
“Stop this cowardly, vile, humiliating work against women and humanity and humankind,” he stated.
However, it is likely the family was speaking under the threat of violence, repeating a script prepared for them while in the Ministry of Interior’s custody.
Just days later, the ministry issued its bizarre claim that 41 of 42 kidnapping cases it allegedly investigated were false, with Levant 24 citing the cases of Mira and Nagham specifically. This suggests the release of the video of Nagham’s family was strategically timed to bolster the claims of the ministry’s forthcoming sham investigation.
However, a closer look at the cases of Mira, Nagham, Mai, and Lana shows that their kidnappings were not fake. Nor are the other cases documented by international media, rights groups, and the UN.
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