Alawite women at the centre of the Syria’s sectarian struggle

Since early 2025, reports have emerged in Syria of abduction, rape, and other forms of gender-based violence against Alawite women and girls. These reports demand urgent investigation and accountability. Crucially, they have surfaced during an uncertain, deeply polarised post-Assad period. In that climate, these women’s experiences are often quickly made to serve competing political narratives, and with that their stories and safety are sidelined. This violence against Alawite women is part of a wider wave of sectarian violence in Syria. How can that violence can be named and investigated without reducing the women affected to symbols of the community they are seen to represent? Its aim is to recentre Alawite women’s experiences, justice, and safety in a crisis that ultimately involves them.

Violence as a political act

Feminist scholarship on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) helps explain this further. It is argued that rape and other forms of gender-based violence function as political acts, is intended to harm both the woman and the wider community she is seen to represent. In this framing, such violence becomes a means of sending a wider message, targeting a specific population and pursuing political aims, including the destruction of a religious or ethnic group. This logic is useful for recognising such crimes and holding perpetrators accountable, but it also carries a risk in how we discuss women in these contexts. When a woman’s body is understood as a battleground for wider ethnic, religious, or political struggles, she risks being reduced only to a symbol of the group to which she belongs. In doing so, we strip her of her individual experiences and, importantly, risk casting her as the passive, symbolic victim, discussed only in terms of what she represents rather than what she is.

The challenge in Syria, therefore, is to recognise what the abuse of Alawite women signals about the nation’s sectarian divisions, without losing sight of the women as individuals rather than as symbols.

The Syrian Context

Syria’s Alawite minority, the sect to which ousted president Bashar al-Assad belongs, has long been viewed as heretical and targeted with violence by extremist groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS). Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in December 2024 and the assumption of power by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-led forces, the community has increasingly become a target for sectarian reprisal. This escalated in March 2025, when an attack by pro-Assad insurgents on the interim government triggered a wave of reprisal killings across the coastal region, leaving more than 1,400 people dead, the majority of them Alawite civilians.

Beyond the events in March, reports of abduction and gender-based violence against Alawite women and girls continue to emerge. The Syrian Feminist Lobby has recorded reports of more than eighty missing women, of which it confirmed twenty-six as abductions, almost all involving Alawite women. The victims range from young children to older women. Some have never been seen again, others return beaten, raped, and in some cases, pregnant.

Accounts from survivors suggest that the violence is often justified in sectarian and theological terms. Some women have reportedly been told that Alawite women were ‘born to be our sabaya’ a term used by some Sunni extremists for women taken as sex slaves in war. Such language presents this abuse as religiously sanctioned and indicates the violence may be intended not only to harm individual women but target the Alawite sect they are seen to represent.

The authorities’ response has made matters worse. In all but one of the documented cases, police and security officials failed to effectively investigate the Alawite women’s whereabouts or to keep families informed. In two cases, officials even blamed the families themselves.

This institutional failure has been accompanied by official denial. In late 2025, the Ministry of Interior’s investigative committee announced it found no evidence of systematic abductions targeting women from any Syrian community. Officials have also been reported recasting disappearances as ‘voluntary migration’ or ‘religious conversion’, the disappearance of Batoul Alloush being a case in point.

Batoul Alloush

The disappearance of Batoul Suleiman Alloush drew considerable public attention and is a clear example of how Alawite women’s stories are quickly turned into political tools within a divided Syria.

Alloush, a 21-year-old Alawite student at Tishreen University in Latakia, disappeared on 29 April 2026. Her family says she was abducted from the university campus. Alloush later appeared in a video, fully veiled, claiming she had left voluntarily and ‘converted to Islam’, an account her family rejected as a coerced statement. The circumstances of her disappearance remain unresolved.

Her case raises serious questions about safety, religious coercion and the authorities’ responsibility to investigate. But it has also been quickly turned into a tool in sectarian and political score-settling. For Alawites and rights groups, she has become a symbol for a community under attack; for the interim government, her recorded statement is proof that she left freely, and no crime took place. In both accounts, her story has become ammunition in someone else’s fight, and in the process Batoul Alloush, a young woman in danger, has been sidelined and reduced to a symbol within the struggle.

Conclusion

Amid Syria’s reconstruction: rebuilding a state and economy, rehoming millions of displaced people, how we frame Syrian women may seem like a secondary concern. But it is vital. How a ‘New Syria’ describes women as it rebuilds matters. If Syrian women continue to be seen as a faceless symbols of a sect, they are denied the individuality, dignity, and justice on which a just Syria must be built. For the interim government seeking legitimacy, this cannot be an afterthought.

Recognising the reported abductions of Alawite women as possible sectarian and politically motivated violence is necessary, and naming it as such is the first step towards challenging it. But justice for these women also requires refusing to treat the women affected as only evidence of that violence. Behind every statistic is a woman irreducible to a symbol and insisting on that is not a distraction from other measures of justice in Syria.

Syria features in the forthcoming NCF Healing the Nations conference to which all are welcome.