It was 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 9. Rawan, a young woman in her 20s, could never have imagined her day would end in such a horrible ordeal.
She had just finished her shift at a women’s accessories shop in the town of Salhab, in the al-Ghab Plain of Hama province. From there, she set off on foot toward her home in the village of Hawrat Ammourin. Having lost her father, she lives there with her mother and uncles. The village is over 5 miles from Salhab, a walk of more than an hour, the only option since there is no transport linking the two places. With rent in town far beyond reach, as prices rise and poverty consumes everything, Rawan had no choice but to make the daily trek.
On that day, while walking along an empty stretch of road between Salhab and her village, broad daylight offered no protection. Two armed men on a motorcycle, dressed in the uniform of the Syrian General Security forces, blocked her path. They seized her, drugged her with an unknown substance until she lost consciousness, then carried her a short distance into nearby olive groves. There, they stripped her and took turns raping her before a third man joined the assault. When they were done, they abandoned her naked in the dirt.
Hours later, Rawan, 23, came to. Her screams caught the attention of a group of Bedouin shepherds, who rushed her to the national hospital in al-Suqaylabiyah.
These details are drawn from the victim’s own statement, reported on social media and in the press, and confirmed to New Lines through Rawan’s uncle.
At the hospital’s police station, Rawan filed an official report. A medical examination confirmed she had been raped, a finding later echoed in a statement by Syria’s Ministry of Interior. But local authorities stopped short of confirming the attackers’ official affiliation. Khaled Mardaghani, director of internal security in the al-Ghab Plain, acknowledged that the assault was carried out by “two men on a motorcycle,” without clarifying whether they were members of the General Security forces or merely wearing its uniform.
As the news spread on social media, some residents of Rawan’s village accused armed men from nearby al-Asharenah, pointing to their presence at security checkpoints in the area. Yet the victim’s uncles and other villagers simply issued a statement condemning the crime while urging caution. They called for a swift investigation to identify the perpetrators and pressed the authorities to release evidence of their identities once confirmed, stressing the importance of avoiding premature accusations.
There were no surveillance cameras at the crime scene itself, but the assailants likely passed under cameras on the main road through the town center, a lead that could prove crucial. Still, it is impossible to hold General Security members, or the agency as a whole, responsible without prompt and credible criminal investigations, especially amid the broader climate of lawlessness gripping Syria at large, not only the al-Ghab Plain.
At the same time, repeated abuses by General Security itself cast a long shadow. Civilians have been detained, tortured and killed in its custody, failures that damage the very security it was created to uphold.
Despite pledges by President Ahmad al-Sharaa, his interior minister and others that the state would not revert to Assad-era practices, recent cases tell a different story. In Homs, Milad al-Farkh died under torture in Wadi al-Nasara just three days after his arrest. In Damascus, Attallah Saleh al-Fayyad was killed in custody after his detention in the Masaken Barzeh neighborhood.
The rape of Rawan marks the first confirmed and publicly acknowledged case of sexual violence to be investigated under Syria’s new regime. What sets it apart from earlier crimes, including rapes during the coastal massacres in Sweida, and across other regions, is that it erupted on social media, which has become a powerful outlet in a country where trust in state media has collapsed. Rawan herself filed an official complaint, and the case quickly escalated into an online firestorm. By contrast, rapes documented in the Syrian government’s own report on the coastal massacres drew little attention, perhaps because victims’ names and details were suppressed, leaving the crimes buried beneath silence and stigma.
The attack is also an indicator of Syria’s deepening social insecurity, reinforced by a policy of impunity. After the massacres along the Syrian coast, and with a similar report still pending in Sweida, not a single perpetrator was arrested, even though many appeared on camera in footage they filmed themselves.
Another sensitive aspect of this crime is sectarian. Rawan is Alawite, while her assailants are believed to be Sunni, a fact made all the more combustible by government supporters’ embrace of sectarian rhetoric in dealing with Syria’s religious communities.
On social media, debate over the sectarian dimension has remained limited. Most Syrians condemned the act itself, with only a handful of exceptions. One such case was the X account of a writer named Abdul Rahman al-Khatib, based in Spain, who attempted to justify the crime by claiming it was not rape but that Rawan was a “sabiyya” (a concubine by captivity) in line with his extremist Islamist worldview. These isolated remarks provoked considerable outrage, with calls to prosecute people espousing such violent views. The reaction reflects a growing public awareness of victims’ rights and a rejection of sectarian justifications.
The circulation of details about the assault, including the victim’s identity and the circumstances of the attack, generated widespread public engagement. Rawan’s case quickly became a symbol of the suffering of Syrian women and the collapse of security across the country. Activists and journalists amplified her story, breaking through a wall of silence that has long surrounded sexual violence in Syria.
In many regions, not only the coast and Sweida, which are home to the Alawite and Druze minorities, respectively, cases of rape are kept quiet amid fear and shame. In contrast, Rawan’s ordeal drew unprecedented attention.
Since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011, horrific evidence has emerged of rape being used as part of a brutal strategy of coercion and terror. Reports and documentation show that all warring parties committed mass and individual rapes against women, children and even men, whether during detention or in attacks on towns and villages.
Forces of the former Syrian regime, according to reports by United Nations bodies and independent Syrian rights groups, engaged in systematic campaigns of sexual violence as a tool of torture and intimidation, particularly at checkpoints and in detention centers, where rapes were carried out alongside harrowing physical and psychological abuse. Armed opposition groups, including those that now govern parts of Syria, have committed similar documented crimes at a smaller scale. Other reports point to rapes carried out by unidentified actors or powerful local figures.
In 2023, the U.N. estimated that 7.3 million people in Syria — most of them women and girls — were in need of services related to gender-based violence. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic has repeatedly reported that rape and other forms of sexual violence, against men as well as women and children, are perpetrated widely in government-controlled detention facilities by agents of the state. The commission concluded that these crimes form part of an attack on the civilian population and amount to crimes against humanity under international law.
The commission documented 30 cases of rape in February 2020 in northern Syria. Members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) were implicated in several incidents, including sexual violence during home raids. FSA fighters used sexual assault as a means of humiliation and coercion, such as the rape of a minor in front of male detainees at a detention facility in Afrin that same year.
According to more than 400 testimonies cited in the report, sexual violence was not limited to women and children but also targeted men and boys across different front lines of the war. In some cases, young men were forced to watch their female relatives being raped before their eyes.
The virality of Rawan’s case placed the Syrian transitional government in a difficult position. Hind Kabawat, the government’s sole female minister, announced that she had contacted Rawan’s family to check on her well-being. She said the family urged an end to incitement and sectarian agitation, rejecting “the demonization of others.” Kabawat added: “This is not just a personal case, it is the concern of an entire society. Let us be clear: There is no place for such crimes among us, and justice must take its course.”
But the minister’s lofty words — she is, after all, supposed to be responsible for social affairs — clash with the reality that it was media coverage of Rawan’s case, not any government plan, that forced her to take notice. As official delegations poured into Rawan’s home while she lay in a state of nervous collapse, the platitudes spilling out of the ministry offered no relief, and no concrete measures have yet been taken. Observers reminded the minister that Salhab and the al-Ghab Plain have seen a string of kidnappings of women whose only “crime” was belonging to the Alawite sect. Many other cases, in a conservative society where families often keep silent, likely go unreported.
Among the women still missing is Rawan Shaaban Rassoud, detained by General Security at a checkpoint in the al-Ghab Plain last February, with no news of her since. Also unaccounted for are Khezana Nayef al-Aboud and Nagham Shadi Aisha, the latter abducted in al-Bayadiyah after being displaced from her home.
Several cases of rape and abduction have been documented on social media or by Syrian civil society activists as well. Hala Ibrahim was kidnapped with her young son; she later fled the area seeking medical treatment for genital injuries, according to Germany’s DW, after being assaulted by men affiliated with the new Syrian government. In the village of Asila in the al-Ghab Plain, Zainab Nasr Diab has been missing since February. Her husband fled with their three children in fear.
Another case is that of Duaa Abbas, abducted from her own home in Salhab in March. Now, whenever her 3-year-old son hears a knock at the door, he bolts into the arms of his disabled father, terrified that he will be next.
According to overall estimates, 24 Alawite women have been confirmed kidnapped without any official body taking action. More than 40 Alawite women who returned from captivity were given no psychological, medical or material support. Meanwhile, the fate of more than 80 kidnapped Druze women remains unknown, according to a U.N. report. Added to this are cases of abduction in other Syrian provinces (Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa and Homs) that are largely ignored by local communities seeking to avoid social stigma.
As Syrians await justice, and many doubt it will ever come or how it would even be implemented, survivors of sexual violence continue to suffer a range of psychological traumas, from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder. Losing hope has become commonplace in a country that has moved from one tyranny to another in different garb. Survivors cannot imagine horrors greater than those they already endure in daily life, scarred by both oppression and grinding poverty.
By some twist of fate, Rawan’s community has not rushed to shame her or cast blame upon her, as others might have done. This compassion may help Rawan find a way to begin her life again, though certainly not by setting out on foot along Syria’s treacherous roads.
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