Syrian women walk past Russia-made tanks as country continues to fall into violence.
CAIRO: Syria is a country facing continued violence, with activists reporting massive bombings on Wednesday as the world’s attention turned to Gaza, where a ceasefire was agreed upon by Israel and Hamas.
But for women and children in Syria, they are continuing to be targeted and reports of rape and execution of women in the country are quickly becoming daily.
According to one female activist, speaking to Bikyamasr.com on condition of anonymity from inside Syria, the media coverage of violence against women in the country is “less than the reality.”
She added that “women in Syria are being raped, often in front of their husbands, tortured and murdered by the government. It is a horrible thing to be a woman in this country.”
The United Nations has called on the government to allow women and children to leave cities under siege, but soldiers appear unwilling to acquiesce, instead raping and murdering women in the city and other areas of the country.
One of the most gruesome events was reported at the end of May by the United Nations observer mission in the country, reporting that most of some 108 people massacred in Houla in the country were shot, execution style. Among those killed were women, children and entire families; killed in their own homes.
The massacre in Houla drew massive international outrage.
“We are at a tipping point,” special envoy at the time Kofi Annan told reporters in Damascus. “The Syrian people do not want the future to be one of bloodshed and division.”
The UN report said most of the dead were killed execution-style, with fewer than 20 cut down by shelling. The UN cited survivors blaming the house-to-house killings on pro-government thugs known as shabiha, who often operate as hired muscle for the regime.
“What is very clear is this was an absolutely abominable event that took place in Houla, and at least a substantial part of it was summary executions of civilians, women and children,” said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN High commissioner for Human Rights.
“At this point, it looks like entire families were shot in their houses.”
Worse still are the reports being published online, on social-media website Facebook, of soldiers capturing and kidnapping women, often teenagers, and locking them in detention centers, where they are raped repeatedly by soldiers.
Human Rights Watch interviewed 10 former detainees, including two women, who described being sexually abused or witnessing sexual abuse in detention, including rape, penetration with objects, sexual groping, prolonged forced nudity, and electroshock and beatings to genitalia. Many of the former detainees told Human Rights Watch that they were imprisoned because of their political activism, including for attending protests. In other cases, the reason for the detention was unclear but detainees suffered the same abusive tactics.
“Syrian security forces have used sexual violence to humiliate and degrade detainees with complete impunity,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
“The assaults are not limited to detention facilities – government forces and pro-government shabiha militia members have also sexually assaulted women and girls during home raids and residential sweeps.”
The reports have outraged women’s activists in the region, who are now blaming the West for doing so little to help the Syrian people.
“Who are we, as a global community, to sit by and allow my friends to be raped and murdered on a daily basis,” one Syrian activist told Bikyamasr.com on Tuesday from northern Syria.
“I have had people tell me how they were stripped, forced to a chair, handcuffed and repeatedly raped by soldiers in a room. They can’t sleep at night, they can’t look at themselves and they wish they were dead. And so many others are just killed after the soldiers rape and mutilate them,” she added.
“What is the world doing for us women?” she asked.
A report by McClatchy newspapers last summer showed that the military is systematically using sexual violence in a way that strikes absolute fear in the population.
“What I have seen with my own eyes, it was indescribable,” said Rolat Azad, 21, who said he’d served as a master sergeant in Idlib province in the northeast of Syria.
There, he commanded 10 men who’d break into houses seeking to arrest men whose names they’d been given by the country’s intelligence agencies, the report continued.
“They gave us orders: ‘You are free to do what you like’,” he recalled.
Starting last July, he said, his unit arrested and tortured five to 10 people daily.
“We had a torture room on our base,” he said. “There was physical torture — beatings — and psychological tortures,” said Azad, a Syrian Kurd who deserted and fled in March to the Kurdistan region of Iraq. “They also brought women and girls through. They put them in the closed room and called soldiers to rape them.”
The women often were killed, he said.
And with it the hope many have for a positive outcome to the horrors that have become the Syrian uprising.
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