Shabiha Women or Spoils of War? Alawite Women Face Grim Choice

*Mariam Abdullah

Editor’s note: The editorial team has used only the first names of some of the interviewees for their own safety.

Rudaina is a 32-year-old government employee, and Alawite, living in the neighbourhood of Ish Al-Warwar, one of the poorest slums on the outskirts of Damascus, where most of the residents originate from the coast. In addition to her day job, Rudaina must also raise her family and cover all their expenses on a combined monthly income of $350. Her husband is also a government employee.

Such dismal economic conditions led many Syrians to join the revolution against President Bashar al-Assad’s government. But Rudaina considers the revolution to be an existential threat and supports the government. Today, she is torn between remaining in Damascus and returning to her village near the city of Mesyaf.

“They hate us,” she said of the opposition and its supporters as tears ran down her face. “They want to kill our men and rape us.”

“They want to send us back to the days of poverty and fear when they forced us to work as their servants,” she said, referring to the imbalance of power between Sunnis and Alawites before Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, came to power and elevated his sect’s standing in the country.

Rudaina recounts several incidents of rape she heard were carried out by Salafists, “to bury the Alawites’ honour in the mud,” she says. Her fear, driven by such stories, has prompted her to sign up for weapons training so that she may join one of the “Popular Committees,” which are basically pro-government militias.

Like many Alawite women, Rudaina fears the fate that awaits her and her family if Assad’s government falls.

The Damascus-based social worker Rana Mohammad tells The Damascus Bureau that such stories are an expression of the fear felt by many in the Alawite community, adding that in Syria’s minority communities such rumours play on existing weaknesses.

“Alawite women are surrounded by fear; they suffer from discrimination within the community because they are women, and at the same time they see the regime as a great benefit to them,” Mohammad explained. “The regime educated them, provided them with work, and did not restrict their freedom. They were pulled out of the past, about which they learned from their grandmothers. So this fear of returning to that, should the regime fall, is an inherited one.”

Fear of sexual violence is not without grounds. Since the start of the crisis in Syria, both sides have accused the other of using rape as a weapon, and numerous instances have been documented.

Those Alawite women who oppose the regime place themselves at perhaps even greater risk than those who are pro-government. Suzanne, 38, is Alawite but sympathetic to the opposition. She fears the reaction from her family and community should her politics become known, so she keeps her activism a secret.

“Intimidation has prevented [Alawite women] from participating in the revolution,” Suzanne said. “Women who have taken part in the revolution, as well as their families, were slandered and there have even been kidnappings and murder at the hands of those who are of the same sect.”

Syrian Journalist Ali Dioub says the Assad’s government painted the revolution as a sectarian war since the very beginning, when it was a mainly a peaceful protest movement. He says the government continues to exploit minorities’ fears of a Sunni Islamist takeover of the country. 

“They are fears [invented by the regime]…but as a minority they are obliged to follow orders, because they do not possess the same power as the Sunni community, by which I mean the willingness to martyr oneself,” he said. 

Rudaina, who is receiving military training, does not mind fighting in defence of the regime; she considers it to be a fight for her very existence, and believes that more women have come forward to fight after the killing of many young Alawites.

“Let them call me shabiha if they like; they consider me such because I do not accept anyone to speak against the regime,” she says. “I will not stop writing reports against those who speak ill of the regime, and if I could I would turn them over to the security agents myself, because I see my country burning before my eyes, and the whole world is conspiring against this president, whom I love.”

“I will defend him to the death. My children and I will sacrifice ourselves for him,” she continued. “We will not go back to being servants; I will not be captured by those who see us as a source of [sexual] pleasure.”

 

*Mariam Abdullah is a pseudonym of a journalist living inside Syria