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📰 A New York Times investigation found that abductions of women and girls from Syria’s Alawite minority were more common, and more brutal, than the government has acknowledged By @NYTBen A 16-year-old girl left her home in northwest Syria last May to visit a shop and disappeared. Weeks later, an anonymous stranger phoned her distraught family and said that he had the teenager and would let her go if they paid thousands of dollars in ransom, according to four people involved in her case. The family paid the ransom and the girl returned in August, more than 100 days after she had been kidnapped. She told confidants that she had been held in a dank basement and was regularly drugged and raped by strangers, the four people said. A medical exam turned up yet another shock: She came home pregnant. Since rebels ousted the dictator Bashar al-Assad in late 2024, panicked families and activists trying to help have regularly sounded the alarm on social media that women and girls from Syria’s Alawite minority have mysteriously disappeared or been kidnapped. Many fear that their sect is being targeted as retribution for the brutality of Mr. al-Assad, who also belongs to the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite. The government has denied that Alawite women and girls are being targeted by kidnappers, saying that it has confirmed only one such case. But a New York Times investigation based on dozens of interviews with Alawites who say they were kidnapped, their relatives and others involved in their cases found that these abductions have been common and often brutal. The Times verified the kidnappings of 13 Alawite women and girls, in addition to one man and one boy. Five said they had been raped. Two came home pregnant. The family of one woman said it sent $17,000 to kidnappers who never released her, and provided screenshots of ransom demands and the money transfers. A 24-year-old said she had been 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. Her relatives also paid the kidnappers and in this case secured her release, according to four people involved in her case. Syrian activists say they know of scores of such kidnappings but details are difficult to confirm because victims and their families are too scared to talk. Most people who spoke with the Times did so on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the government or the kidnappers. The Times is not identifying most of those who were kidnapped for the same reason. The Times corroborated accounts from people who had been kidnapped and their relatives, as well as through social media posts announcing when they were taken and returned, ransom messages sent by kidnappers and interviews with medical and aid workers who spoke with the abductees after their release. The kidnappings took place against a backdrop of deep distrust between the Alawites, who make up about one-tenth of Syria’s population, and the new government. Mr. al-Assad relied heavily on his sect in his military and security services while in power. That led many of the Sunni Muslim former rebels who now run Syria to associate the Alawites with the ousted regime. Last March, that anger fueled days of sectarian violence in northwestern Syria that left about 1,400 people dead, according to a U.N. investigation. The inquiry found that some government security forces had participated in the killing, leaving many Alawites afraid of them. Many of the kidnapped women and girls, along with their relatives, said the government had failed to take their cases seriously. nytimes.com/2026/04/03/wor…