26/09/12
The BBC interviewed a woman from Homs who said she was arrested at a checkpoint and repeatedly raped in detention at the Palestine Security Branch in Damascus along with three other women. She said the rape was daily and took place in front of the other women, who would have their blindfolds removed. “It was done in rotation,” she said.
The woman told the BBC that her interrogator used rats and mice during the sexual assaults on herself and other women. She said she heard screams and later saw blood on the floor of the prison. She described overhearing men saying at one point: “Is this good enough for you? They were mocking her. It was obvious she was in agony. We could see her. After that she no longer moved.” She did not, however, specify who exactly she was referring to in this particular attack.
After two months, the woman escaped and fled Damascus, she told the BBC.
“Every few days, they would bring a new girl,” she said, “I’ve now been out for six or seven months. How many new girls have they brought in, in this time?”
WMC’s Women Under Siege has previously mapped another report mentioning the use of mice during a sexual assault; it is still unclear whether these two reports are related. Our previously mapped report allegedly took place either in a Damascus apartment or at the Palestine Security Branch: https://womenundersiegesyria.crowdmap.com/reports/view/60
The dates of the reported rapes are unknown. Because Syrian government officials currently refuse to allow access to journalists, researchers, and aid workers, Women Under Siege cannot independently verify this report of sexualized violence in Syria.
09/08/2012
ALEPPO, Syria — The consequences of the war here have become familiar: neighborhoods shelled, civilians killed and refugees departed. But in the background, many Syrians describe something else that has them cowering with fear: a wave of lawlessness not unlike the crime wave Iraq experienced during the conflict there.
From Dara’a, near the Jordanian border, to Homs, Damascus and here in Syria’s commercial capital — the fighting has essentially collapsed much of the civilian state. Even in neighborhoods where skirmishes are rare, residents say thieves prey on the weak, and police stations no longer function because the officers have fled.
Kidnapping, rare before, is now rampant, as a man named Hur discovered here last month. He simply wanted to drive home. The man shoving a pistol into his back had other plans. “Keep walking,” the gunman told Hur, 40, a successful businessman, as they approached his car. “Get in.”
Hur said he initially thought he was being arrested by government agents. But then, after blindfolding him, his three captors made a phone call that revealed baser motives.
“They asked my family to ransom me with 15 million Syrian pounds,” Hur said of the abductors’ demand for about $200,000. “They were criminals, not a political group. They told me they knew me and they knew my family could pay.”
Rebel leaders have been trying to fill the void. “We are running patrols to protect our areas from thieves and criminals,” said Abu Mohammad, 30, a rebel fighter in eastern Aleppo.
But as bloody ground battles rage throughout the city, rebel control is limited. Syrians in Aleppo and elsewhere now say they bury their jewelry and other valuables inside their furniture. Some people no longer keep money in their pockets when they venture outside; residents and business owners across the country are padlocking their property to protect against armed opportunists mingling with combatants.
“No one wants to leave their houses, because you never know who is going to stop you or attack you,” said Yasmin, 50, a resident of Aleppo who was too afraid to give her last name. “Chaos, lawlessness, fear, it is just so chaotic, and with all the thugs in the streets, you never know who might kidnap you and ask for a ransom.”
Aleppo’s slide toward something resembling anarchy began months ago. Factory owners here in the country’s industrial capital said the roads outside the city went first, as armed bandits seized whatever they wanted from passing vehicles. One of Syria’s main automobile exporters recently told a Lebanese friend that he had to start sending vehicles to Iraq by boat from Lebanon because of the insecurity.
Then more reports of kidnappings started surfacing. By the end of March, as the government claimed to have retaken control of nearby cities, ransom demands were a daily occurrence in Aleppo, said Amal Hanano, a Syrian writer and analyst living in the United States. Usually, she said, the kidnappers asked for around $75,000 and then dropped their price to a fifth of that after tough negotiations.
Hur, using a nickname out of fear that he could be targeted again, said that his brother talked his kidnappers down to about $30,000 in Syrian pounds. It took a week. He said he spent most of the time tied to a water pipe in the back of a small store somewhere outside Aleppo.
His kidnappers made sure he had enough food and water. They took his cellphone, his watch and a gold ring but they left his car near the city, to establish their credibility. “They told my family where to find the car and the keys to prove that I was with them,” said Hur, indicating that they had probably kidnapped before.
In addition to gaining more expertise as the conflict drags on, criminals are also becoming more brazen. Yasmin said that a few days ago her cousin, a 65-year-old man, was robbed in his garden at 1:30 in the afternoon. His family watched helplessly as the thieves stole all he had, about $70. Now her brother, who lives across the street, makes sure his pockets are empty before he leaves home.
“We’ve all become a lot more careful since that incident,” Yasmin said. “Can you imagine? It’s not even safe to carry $70.”
Many Syrians blame the government of President Bashar al-Assad for allowing the crime to happen, or even encouraging it. Ms. Hanano, along with many activists, say the crime waves afflicting Syrian cities began over the past year when the unrest led to a guerrilla war. The battles themselves led to mass flight and empty streets, making it easier to crack open a store like a piñata.
It was Iraq, circa 2003, in miniature: in areas where decades of suppressive government have suddenly been lifted, looting, violence and sectarianism have begun to thrive.
But the lawlessness may be more systemic. For years, the Assad government relied for control on private militias called shabiha that were paid by the government or by its wealthy supporters. With the government stretched financially and many businessmen fleeing or switching sides, those payments appear to have stopped, Ms. Hanano and others said, leading many militia members to pay themselves however they can, often with violence as a byproduct.
One human rights group, Women Under Siege, said it had documented nearly 100 cases of rape in Syria since the conflict started, with many of them involving several men believed to be members of pro-government militias.
The shabiha’s behavior, some activists said, contributes to the kind of rage that led rebels to summarily execute several people suspected of being shabiha members in a video from Aleppo that emerged last week.
But the shabiha are hardly the only problem. Rebel commanders have said that there are “daylight robberies” in the bread lines of the bakeries that they control, with thieves grabbing more than their allotted loaves to sell for a premium on the black market.
Rebel fighters have also been seen stealing cars and destroying a restaurant in Aleppo where Syrian soldiers have sometimes eaten. Some residents of Aleppo who say they care about peace and distrust both sides in the conflict said that both rebels and government militias — or their sympathizers — were targeting anyone they thought supported the other side.
The penalty for that hastily determined loyalty is usually exacted by a group of men carrying guns. “The city of Aleppo has become like the wild,” said Hur, sitting in his parents’ fancy home in an upscale Aleppo neighborhood. “The big fish eat the small ones.”
Source: The New York Times
We’re tracking reports of sexualized violence in Syria, where the attacks appear to be potentially orchestrated by government security forces.
Syrian army soldiers kidnapped, raped, and killed some of 16-year-old Zaynab’s classmates. When they came looking for her father, her family fled their home in Homs for Lebanon, where they live as refugees. (Matilde Gattoni).
A woman swathed in black squares her shoulders and calmly looks into a camera. She holds a Quran. Only a sliver of her face — her eyeglasses — shows. “What happened to me hasn’t happened to anyone, or if it has affected anyone else I do not know,” she says. “But I will speak and let all the people know what [Syrian leader] Bashar al-Assad and his men are doing.” Over the next four minutes, her breathing grows labored and her voice breaks as she describes how, in May 2011, five men wearing black entered her home on the outskirts of Homs and raped her.
“This is my message to the world,” she says. “Let all the world hear what is happening to us. And I might not be the first one nor the last who was treated in this way.”
The still-unidentified woman posted the video to YouTube on February 11, 2012. It is one of the earliest reports on our live, crowd-sourced map of sexualized violence in Syria. The Women’s Media Center project Women Under Siege has been collecting reports out of Syria for three months, during which time we’ve seen many stories similar to this, in which multiple attackers, usually government forces, are said to gang rape a woman in her home. We have also mapped stories at the extreme edge of nightmares; of teenage girls given shots that immobilize them while their genitals were burned or filled with mice. Government forces and others appear to be carrying out appalling sexualized attacks against women, men, and children in Syria as the conflict there continues. Although we are unable to independently confirm these stories — Syria is simply too dangerous, and our research staff too small — they are consistent both internally and within the news and NGO reports telling similar stories from the Syrian conflict.
To step back from the red dots on our map and try to understand the sexualized violence of Syria’s war, our team of doctors, activists, and journalists has taken the 81 stories we’ve gathered so far, from the onset of the conflict in March 2011 through June 2012, and broken them down into 117 separate pieces of data on everything from rape to the consequences of sexualized violence, such as depression, HIV, and pregnancy. Many more victims are included in these reports, but the vagueness of much of the information does not allow us to give an estimate of the total number. For example, one report tells of an incident in which the Syrian army allegedly raped 36 women while another speaks of a doctor who is treating some of the “2,000 girls and women raped throughout Syria.” Our data, though largely anecdotal, gives us a sense of the scope and impact of sexualized violence in Syria. It appears to be widespread, not limited to any particular city, and often involves rape.
“The data we have so far suggest sexualized violence is being used as a tool of war, although possibly haphazardly and not necessarily as an organized strategy,” said Dr. Karestan Koenen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the lead epidemiologist on the mapping project. “These reports indicate that post-conflict intervention will need to address the consequences of sexualized violence for victims.”
Government perpetrators have committed the majority of the attacks we’ve been able to track: 61 percent, including attacks against men and women, with another 6 percent carried out by government and shabiha forces together. These soldiers or officers have allegedly carried out 58 percent of rapes against women; shabiha (plainclothes militia) attackers 14 percent; government and shabiha working together 5 percent; and another or unknown attacker 26 percent. In 42 percent of the incidents of sexualized violence against women that we found, the victims were allegedly attacked by multiple people at once, suggesting a disturbingly high rate of gang rape.
There are well-documented challenges and limitations when it comes to studying sexualized violence in conflict, and our data is not meant to represent the Syrian conflict in its entirety. All of our reports come second- or third-hand, and can’t be independently confirmed. Still, the data provides a small but criticalwindow into Syria’s ongoing violence.
“These new data drawn from reports of sexualized violence crimes in the Syria conflict give us an important initial snapshot of the scale and scope of this horror,” said Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, which conducts research and advocacy related to rape in armed conflict.
Women Under Siege
“The fact that a large portion of the alleged crimes involved multiple attackers indicates possible coordinated, orchestrated, or systematic violence without restraints on the behavior of government and other forces,” Sirkin said. In other words, either Syrian leaders appear to be instructing soldiers to violate women, or the Syrian armed forces have descended into such a Lord of the Flies-style chaos that rape is becoming more routine.
Of the 117 reports, 80 percent of them include female victims, with ages ranging from 7 to 46. Of those, 89 percent reported rape; 6 percent reported groping; 6 percent include sexual assault without penetration; and 11 percent of reports include detention that appears to have been for the purposes of sexualized violence or enslavement for a period of longer than 24 hours. It’s difficult to know intent, but some soldiers have described being ordered to detain women to rape them. We’re keeping an eye out for similarities to Bosnia’s infamous “rape houses,” such as this one in Foča.
Syrian women are suffering more than just sexualized violence itself, with 20 percent of reports leading to the victim’s death, 10 percent to anxiety and/or depression, and 5 percent to pregnancy. “Death” means that women were found dead with signs of sexual assault or they were raped and then killed in front of witnesses, as in this report in which a mother describes watching her three daughters stripped, raped, and murdered by knife-wielding security forces. “You could only hear the screams and the cries of the little ones asking for help, but this did not make them show any mercy,” she recalled.
So far, we’ve found 24 incidents involving men and boys between the ages of 11 and 56 who have also reported sexualized violence as a consequence of the Syrian conflict. Thirty-three percent of reports with male victims allege rape and 38 percent include sexual assault without penetration. Almost 17 percent include multiple attackers. In all but one case, the perpetrators of sexual violence against men were reportedly members of government forces. This is likely due to the fact that most — 75 percent — of the reported sexual torture has occurred in detention facilities, staffed and run by the government, where rape and sexual assault appear to be used as a tool of torture. The other 25 percent of reports do not specify the exact location, in many cases because the attack was in the victim’s home — in a number of these, the male victim is forced to watch as his wife or daughter is raped.
“The fact that about a fifth of the reports involve male victims also points to unbridled terror, given the enormous stigma and silence that typically surrounds mass rape of men,” said Sirkin.
The one city that has produced the most reports is Homs, the long-suffering center of protest, with 37 percent of incidents. Surprisingly, the second-most frequent source of the reports is Damascus, the supposedly quiet capital city, with 12 percent of reports.
Our numbers tell us that there is a potentially tremendous human rights crisis unfolding for women, men, and children in Syria. Behind each number though, is a life — a family, or even a whole community — now potentially destroyed by rape and sexualized torture.
Jackie Blachman-Forshay contributed research.
Source: The Atlantic
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