"Indicators show sanctions are hitting ordinary Syrians the hardest"
What can be done?
"Western countries should agree on a set of detailed objectives within the agreed framework of 2254 to resolve the conflict and tie sanctions to measurable and attainable goals. [such as =>
To tie sanctions to specific improvements on human rights, such as releasing detainees, setting up independent visits to detention facilities, and stopping arbitrary detentions by security agencies to give civil society initiatives an appropriate and safe working environment.
Progress on key aspects of the constitution or focus on reforms and accountability efforts in the security sector. The regime will resist this but at least the benchmarks and the expectations will be clearer than they are today.
provide direct financial support for traditional businesspersons and SMEs (small & medium enterprises) in Syria by opening parallel financial channels with them as a substitution of the formal ones which are sanctioned and controlled by pro-regime entities and individuals.
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She resisted. He called another man. One of them held her down and the other raped her. She says, “I fainted. When I woke up, there were seven men in the room. They took turns raping me.”
Samira says that she escaped after being abducted, gang-raped and sold into a forced
marriage. That isn’t her real name, of course.
She’s too scared to allow it to be published. She is 23, with long chestnut hair, and we speak over WhatsApp using a translator. She tells me she was snatched off the street while visiting the city of Homs in February. This is
her account of what happened:
A white panel van daubed with mud for camouflage – ‘a military vehicle’ – pulled up and six men wearing balaclavas jumped out.
Samira ran but they caught her and threw her into the back. She thrashed around as the van moved off, trying to free herself while hands gripped her arms and legs and punches rained down. Then one of the men raised his boot and stamped on her face. ‘I didn’t move
after that.’
The next morning, Samira found her-self alone. She opened the door and started down the concrete stairs. Someone hit her
on the back on the head with a rifle-butt and she crumpled. She was dragged back to the
room with the mattress. This time, four men raped her. They called her ‘unveiled whore’
and ‘Nusayri pig’, a sectarian insult. Days passed with more rapes. In between, she was
left blindfolded, hands tied. She remembers two ropes, one green, one brown. She grew
very weak.
One day, the men ordered Samira and the older woman to go down the stairs and sit on
Caption here over 2 lines if
necessary the bare concrete floor. They told the older
woman, ‘No one paid for you’ and shot her in the chest, a single bullet from a Kalashnikov. Somehow, the woman remained sitting upright, her legs slightly splayed, blood gushing from her chest. The men told Samira: ‘Say your prayers.’ She threw herself to the ground, fingertips touching their boots, begging for her life. ‘I was shaking all over.’
But they didn’t kill her. They told her to lay down and they collected some of the other woman’s blood in a bucket. They
poured blood on the ground next to Samira’s head and they took pictures, apparently to fake her death. That evening, she understood why. An older man arrived, in his sixties, and
the others called him ‘emir’ or prince. She had to shower and dress and he made her turn around, inspecting her. Then he handed the men a suitcase full of cash. She had been sold.
The emir gave Samira a black niqab to wear and took her to sit in the back of a Range Rover.
Pointing to a pistol on his hip,
he said: ‘If you make a move on the road, I’ll shoot you.’ She begged him to say what was
going to happen to her. ‘I saved your life,’ he replied. ‘They were going to kill you like that other woman. I paid for you. You belong to me. It will be like I am your husband; you will do everything I say.’ She stayed with him in a house somewhere in the northern province of Idlib.
She did not want to speak about that period, just saying: ‘I wish I had died before I went there.’ He seemed to be someone impor-
tant: officials visited his home; he was never stopped at checkpoints. She managed to convince him that she had accepted her fate and he let her call her family. They had already
held a funeral for her.
Lattakia, #Syria: The young Alawite, Ali Iyad Hamdan, 22 years old, was martyred by bullets from members of government-backed militias near the al-Muzayri’a Bridge in the city of Lattakia this morning, June 21.
A young Alawite man was martyred in a sectarian attack in Baniyas.
The young man, Muhammad Shaaban Diop, from the village of Al-Mawrid in the Baniyas countryside, was shot June 19 by gunmen on a motorcycle from the predominantly Sunni village of Al-Bayada. There have been no arrests.
The trappings of governance exist – ministers, ministries, announcements, ceremonies, meetings, photo-ops; but the substance does not.
Authority is centralised in the person of the president and radiates outwards from him through a constellation of loyalists, family members and HTS veterans.
"Authoritarian mechanisms based on loyalty and patronage appear not as temporary necessities, but deliberate tools of power."
Sharaa’s rule is defined by the presence of institutions but in phantom form. Accountability mechanisms are avoided; transparency is smothered.
between figures who support conditional engagement with the new Syrian leadership and others (including Sebastian Gorka, the National Security Council's counterterrorism official) who view the new Syrian leadership as "jihadists" and de facto "al-Qaeda" elements.
It seemed to me that this latter group currently predominates within the government. I also heard that the Israeli position, hostile to the new Syrian leadership and calling for keeping Syria fragmented and weak, is having a significant impact on the Trump administration's thinking on #Syria.
Alawite women in #Syria being abducted and used as Sabaya just like the Yazidis.
“They tortured and beat us. We weren’t allowed to speak to each other, but I heard the kidnappers’ accents. One of them had a foreign accent and the other had a local Idlib accent. I knew that because they were insulting us because we were Alawites.”
Following the testimonies of Syrian women who were kidnapped on the Syrian coast, we found Rabab, who was kidnapped in broad daylight and found herself with Basma (a pseudonym) in the same house, where they were both beaten and insulted for being “Alawites,”
The phenomenon is reminiscent of the Yazidi captivity in Iraq, but has yet to reach the same level.
There have been repeated pleas from families trying to uncover the fate of their daughters who were kidnapped in broad daylight, whether from the Syrian coastal cities and countryside, or from the countryside of Homs and Hama.
Thread about the situation on #Syria's #Alawite coastal region My brother-in-law traveled from Qadmous to Latakia today - March 12, 2025. This is what he saw.
He was accompanied by Sunni regime officials to make sure that he would not be shot.
He counted 8 checkpoints between his village and Banias on the coast - a 20 minute drive - from his village.
There were no Amn al-`Amm (gov security) at any of the checkpoints. He did not see any HTS uniforms or police uniforms. None of the vehicles had markings on them.
(Photo of Qadmous castle)
Most men at the 8 checkpoints were wearing masks to hide their faces. Those manning the checkpoints between the town of al-Midan and Sqibleh (the higher mountains) were strangers to the region.
Those between Sqibleh and Banias (the lower mountains) were from the Banias region. There were two very different types of men on the road.