afrinpost – Special
The file of forced marriage and rape cases are of the most sensitive issues, and the paradox lies in the fact that the victim is more careful than the perpetrator by keeping the crime in secret, and at the same time this file is stripped from the Turkish occupation militia any moral characterization, and it drops all the slogans that it raises, and confirms that it is Ankara’s tool to violate the region and put the pressure on people to completely displace them.
“afrinpost” learned from its sources that a gunman of “al-Hamzat” militia threatened a Kurdish family in the countryside of Afrin to kidnap her daughter if she insisted on not marrying him.
The sources pointed out that the Kurdish girl refused to marry the gunman who proposed to her, but he tried to exert all kinds of pressures on her family to accept, as he dragged the girl’s father twice in succession to the militia’s headquarters, and intimidated him by making fabricated accusations against him.
As part of putting pressure on the family, the gunman cut down 200 olive trees belonging to the family. After exhausting all methods, he threatened to kidnap the girl under the pretext of belonging to the party, and referring to the Syrian Democratic Forces, and for their part, the girl’s family sent her outside Afrin region to protect her from abduction and forced marriage.
In view of the security conditions of the victims and taking into account the social embarrassment in such cases, “afrinpost” refrains from publishing additional details.
In another incident, a Kurdish woman, the mother of two, was forced to flee al-Mahmudiyah neighborhood in Afrin and went via smuggling routes to the al-Shahba areas about a month ago, after an armed member of “al-Hamzat” militia pressured her to marry him at gunpoint, taking advantage of her circumstance because of her husband’s arrest in earlier period.
On 9/9/2020, “afrinpost”, quoting its correspondent, reported that armed men of “al-Hamzat” militia affiliated with the Turkish occupation and the Muslim Brotherhood organization, went to the home of a Kurdish young man from the village of Gazeh, only four days after his marriage, and rudely asked him to accompany them to their home. The reporter added that the husband was knowledgeable, so he understood the seriousness of the situation and realized that any reaction against them would have very bad results for him, by fabricating a charge against him and depositing him in prison or kidnapping him and even killing him, so asked them to give him one day, citing a health problem, and so the agreement was to return on the next day, as the gunmen left, the husband took advantage of the remaining hours and fled with his wife, leaving the house and the village, and heading to al-Shahba areas.
The Syrian Observatory had published a news about the rape of an Afrin girl on the evening of the 30th of June 2020, but it deleted the news out of concern for the safety of the girl after the many threats by the Muslim Brotherhood militias to liquidate the family if they spoke about the matter, then the Syrian Observatory returned to publish the news again after communicating with the girl’s relatives.
The incident occurred in early June 2020 when gunmen from the “Sultan Murad Division” militia asked to marry a twenty-year-old Kurdish girl from her father. They were led by the mukhtar of the village appointed by the militia, but their request is categorically rejected by the father, and they responded by assaulting him, beating him and forcibly kidnapping his daughter for marrying her out of force to one of the gunmen After three days, the girl was returned to her family, only to find out later that all the four gunmen who came to the family’s house had raped her.
The file of forced marriage, abductions of women and rape is complicated by the lack of sufficient information, and the militias denying their detention of women, but the storming of the headquarters of “al-Hamzat” militia on 05/28/2020 was one of the most important incidents that revealed at one time the kidnapping of ten women who appeared in a video to be consistent evidence of their presence in the prisons of the militia. Thus, the militia was forced to gradually release them.
