Every number is a face unseen, a voice that never found an ear to hear.

The Kidnapped Syrian Women — Alawite and Druze: Numbers and Wounds Impossible to Count

These calamities weren't the children of war only; they were offspring of its darkest womb.

In a time when the banners of religion were intertwined with the banners of war, and terror became a daily norm, a lot of women were enduring a merciless fate — a fate that would never have been possible if not for the chaos that gave way to radical factions to toy with people's lives and dignity.

Massacres followed one another on the coast and in the south — each followed by waves of enforced disappearance, extortion, and kidnapping. As if the blood already spilled was not enough, it seemed to look for what remained of pain in the hearts of mothers and children.

International and human rights reports have placed the number of abducted Alawite women and girls at around 38 documented cases, according to the UN Human Rights Committee and Amnesty International. Reuters, for its part, has documented at least 33 kidnappings in the coastal regions of Syria, with expectations that many cases are not reported due to fear and inaccessibility.

In southern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights recorded 293 cases of abducted Druze women in the attacks that struck As-Suwayda province in July 2025, while other sources from the UN and local parties confirm that the verified number exceeds 80 cases, amid a lack of accurate statistics and the refusal of many families to report cases for fear of stigma or retaliation.

Yet these statistics, for all their document value, represent only a portion of the truth.

Behind every statistic is the story of a woman whose face has been obliterated, her scream resounding off walls; behind every case, a file that remains sealed in an archive where the tragedies pile higher than papers.

While I was working on this article, and I was noting down the figure of Alawite and Druze women who were kidnapped, I made a mistake. I wrongly put down the figure — then went back to the source, corrected it, and smiled at my error that had doubled the figure.

But I went quiet for a moment. The pen fell from my hand.

I wondered:

Had the number of women who were kidnapped really ended at what was mentioned in the report?

Did I get it wrong truly — or did something inside me write down the real number, the one that the media will never hear, the one that reports can't possibly reach?

Here came the avalanche of questions:

How many women remained unspoken of for fear of shame?

How many have not a single individual to ask after them and tell their stories?

How much longer will this number keep rising?

How can we talk of kidnapped women as if they were mere numbers?

I understand how we can talk of deaths in numbers — because we're referring to individuals who have traveled to a fate we all will meet. We grieve for them, yes, for their families, for the suffering of parting.

But how can we talk of the abducted, who are still fighting death every single day?

My mind unfolded into a network of unbearable imagination then:

How do they live? Where, and with whom?

Where do they sleep? How many times do they die each hour?

What happens after they lose their voices from screaming?

What do they feel when pain numbs their bodies completely?

So many women are harassed on public streets, at school, or at work — even in front of those who might, however weakly, be in a position to offer some protection.

But what about those now sheltered with her abuser?

That mother, whose three children wait for her — the oldest coming into manhood, the youngest preparing for his first day of school —

What is she thinking?

Is she worried that her little boy will be late on his first day of school, that it will affect his future?

Or does she bemoan the fact that she will not be present at her son's college graduation?

Does she yearn for her partner's arms, her home, her security?

Or is she scared of the return journey — because the road back home carries a shame and humiliation her society will not permit her to wipe out?

Shame as a cloak — worn once, never shed.

The darkness of that mother's fate mirrors the fates of so many others — the lover, the beloved daughter, the diligent student — all torn from life without warning.

In what way did darkness invade their lives unbidden?

But then — is it destiny?

What is "Destiny," and where does it reside?

Why do we find it so convenient to attribute our defeats to fancied forces?

Is it another way of stating we are powerless to find these women?

Why isn't anything serious being undertaken regarding it?

Who are the kidnappers, and who are the ones supporting them?

Where are these women being kidnapped to?

Are these kidnappings a continuation of those that swept northern Syria in the past?

Did the kidnappers come alongside the new forces from the north on a certain agenda?

Or did they capitalize on tribal incitement — the calls to "raid" those southern towns — turning those people raw material for their macabre business?

Each of these questions demands thorough, documented answers through ongoing investigations, supported by international human rights groups — and by government agencies whose own members are quite possibly implicated.

The Silence That Kills Twice

The kidnapping crime and contempt for other people's lives is monstrous —

but also the silence that follows, the families' covering up of those crimes under the weight of social taboo, their insistence on not letting the victims' faces or words be made public — that too is a crime, silent and complicit.

A crime against their own daughters, and against other girls who may still meet the same destiny.

Such silence is in traditions whose sensitivity varies from place to place. There are several direct testimonies of Alawite women who had been abducted and later returned home after ransom had been paid.

Quite the opposite, it is almost impossible to obtain any direct testimonies of the Druze victims, though the number of cases in the south is several-fold larger than on the coast — and far more complex and dangerous, being mixed with sectarian hate deliberately provoked against the Druze, later confirmed by the Ministry of Interior to be forged.

Southern public squares echoed with sectarian chants against the Druze,

yet no authority intervened — no voice was heard in condemnation.

Would that we hear a voice from the south,as we heard the voice of Noura, the Alawite woman from the coast, who bravely told her story:

how her abductors asked if she were Alawite before dragging her into a car,

after they drugged her to make her more submissive,

and how they tore her child from her arms — he too abducted.

She was released only after a large ransom was paid.

But she never really returned; she came back broken,

her spirit crushed, her body heavy with fear.

Noura's story resonates with those of so many other women across Syria —

women who vanish into a cloud of silence, their fates remolded by hands that know only brutality.

And how do words convey what she has seen — 

a woman kidnapped by the killer of her son, her husband, her father?

What does she dream, curled up in herself in some cold, empty corner of her kidnapper's house?

That same monster — who once struck her son's face,

spat out words meant to strip him of his dignity,

forced him to make animal sounds for his own depraved entertainment —

before finally shooting him in front of her eyes.

No wonder one hostage — whose name was never released for her own safety —

feigned compliance, acting the part of her captor's servant and fiancée,

until he trusted her. Then she hid a knife and stabbed him in the chest — and fled.

We would call that a victorious ending,

but was, in fact, the start of a darker page —

for in revenge, her kidnappers murdered the other women they held.

And that brave girl — where is she now?

Did she escape to safety?

Or slips away into the very silence she had broken free of?

Sometimes I feel so detached from this world —

from my head, my reason, my heart.

Ten years ago, I dreamed that I would be writing of freedoms — of horizons beyond fear —

not of a time even history itself has tried to efface.

Why did history stop here?

Why did it turn back?

The ghosts and the pain of those kidnapped women surround us all —

surround our daughters, our lovers, our mothers.

Any law or silence we accept today

will be tomorrow's legalized crime.

Write history with your own hands —

before it is written with their tears.

We may never know the real figures.

Perhaps we never will.

But we do know that every figure represents a life stolen twice —

once when she is torn from her family and homeland,

and again when she is reduced to a line in a report.

Those figures are not statistics.

They are delayed screams,

souls suspended between absence and hope.

And maybe our task now is more than witness —

to speak, and to keep speaking —

so that the voices of the vanished

don't get swallowed up in the silence of the world.

Saad Al Halabi is a novelist, poet, and writer of short stories. He participates in cultural and literary initiatives, including Literally Peace and Tafakur Forum. He is also a regular contributor to The Samos Chronicles.