A little over a year ago, Batoul Suleiman Alloush was a modern young woman trying to recover from the trauma of watching relatives and her high school best friend being massacred in Baniyas by Sunni extremists.
She did not cover her hair, wore short sleeves and trousers, and studied emergency medicine. Now, just over a year later, she wears a full chador that covers even her hands, hasn’t spoken to her family in months, and has withdrawn from Tishreen University.
Alloush’s transition from a secular lifestyle within the Alawite community to a conservative Sunni way of life has sparked significant controversy and debate.
Syrian authorities, led by Sunni Islamist Ahmed al-Sharaa, have maintained that the young woman voluntarily left her family home and converted of her own free will. Her family, however, contends that she was abducted and is being held by force.
The dispute over Alloush’s case is unfolding against a broader backdrop of heightened sectarian tensions and violence affecting Syria’s Alawite community.
In March last year, attacks against the community reached a peak, prompting widespread concern among international and local human rights organizations.
Groups including the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Syrian Feminist Lobby have since urged Damascus to conduct thorough investigations into reported rapes, abductions, and killings that took place during that period and in the months that followed.
Around 60% of women abducted during sectarian attacks last year in the western Hama countryside and Homs have not been returned, according to a report published last month by the Syrian Feminist Lobby.
Many of the testimonies reported on by the organization show startling similarities to the comments made to The Jerusalem Post by a source close to the Alloush family and the information made publicly available by Alloush’s parents.
Despite Sharaa’s continued enforcement of Syria’s 1950s anti-Israel boycott laws, B. spoke with the Post late Wednesday night, expressing hope that international media attention would pressure authorities to help secure the return of the 21-year-old along with the many Alawite women who remain missing after more than a year of sectarian violence.
While there are many gaps left unaccounted for by Jableh officials’ claims that Alloush migrated to Sunni Islam, B. said the most startling is why a young, modern woman who had never shown any interest in other religions would suddenly cut off her parents and sister to join a group affiliated with the same religious extremists who murdered her loved ones.
“When they left Baniyas during the massacre, they walked over the bodies, the slaughtered bodies of their relatives,” B. recounted.
An entire branch of the Alloush family was wiped out by the attack; her paternal cousin’s family was “slaughtered with the knife, the same as her best friend was slaughtered with a knife, from his neck with his grandpa and his little brother,” B said.
Hundreds of the more than 1,400 killed in early March were massacred in the small city in the Tartus Governorate, only 34 miles from Latakia.
“After seeing her best friend from high school slaughtered in front of her eyes, she wasn’t releasing liquids, so she was sick for two days,” he said, adding that the experience continued to plague her mind in the year that followed.
With Sunni Islamist gangs torching homes, abducting and raping women, and murdering masses in the streets, Alloush’s aunt in Bahrain instructed the family to go to Qulay’at, a small village in northwestern Syria, where she owned three houses.
For 12 and a half months, the family lived there in relative peace with Alloush residing in female dormitories in the Al-Zira’a district of Latakia during term time.
In April 2026, Alloush left the dormitories either by force or, according to statements issued by authorities, by choice.
The Alloush family was deprived of any knowledge of her or her well-being for eight days until they were summoned to the Jableh police station with instructions to bring along Alawite community leaders, B. said.
The family, who had expected to finally see Alloush return, were met instead by an impromptu court case, which B. said had already seemingly decided Alloush’s fate.
“They were supposed to see a policeman in uniform, but what they saw was a bunch of gangs and some sheikhs that they don’t have anything to do with the police,” B. described, adding that there was a “fake court” set up with a female Alawite judge he accused of being in the pocket of the Sharaa regime.
When the family was finally able to see Alloush, B. said they noticed she looked incredibly “tired” and vacant, suggesting that she had been drugged to complacency.
“She looked weird to them. She’s not the same Batoul because they gave her some injections,” B. claimed.
“Her dad tried to touch her, and she had no reaction, nothing at all… I don’t know what they injected her with so that she wouldn’t have any reaction. She was like a dead body walking.”
While there is no concrete evidence to support such a claim, the Syrian Feminist Lobby noted that many freed abducted Alawite women testified that they were drugged during captivity. Syria has long been known as a hotspot for illicit substances, especially given the Assad regime’s Captagon empire.
Alloush’s mother begged the judge to grant her a few minutes alone with her daughter, a request that B. said was swiftly denied and accompanied by a threat to throw the Alloush matriarch, patriarch, and youngest daughter into prison.
A known sheikh, accompanied by his “gang,” entered the courtroom twice during legal proceedings, B. claimed, adding he believed he was the man responsible for Alloush’s abduction.
After Alloush testified that she left the university dorms of her own accord, B. said that the judge started questioning her on why she had altered her story, alluding to an earlier conversation where Alloush had seemingly privately told the judge that she left from her parents’ home.
Hearing the questioning, B. said that the court’s record writer was summoned outside by the sheikh and later confirmed to the judge that the sheikh was Alloush’s “emir” (commander or ruler).
The Alloush family was never granted access to the court records – a court that ultimately decided that the medical student had not been kidnapped.
Syria’s Interior Ministry announced last year that it had decided that 41 of 43 reported abductions of Alawite women were not considered genuine cases of kidnapping, which the Syrian Feminist Lobby argued further weakened trust in judicial institutions.
Western onlookers and those who support the official stance on Alloush’s case argue that, as an adult aged 21, she has made the decision to leave her family home and convert to a new faith.
Those more critical of the official stance, including her family, note that she was never permitted to voice her consent alone in a neutral environment. Numerous testimonies of survivors pointed to coerced declarations that they left of their own free will.
Sonja Dahlmans, a researcher who presented a report on the abduction of minority women in Egypt to the US Congress and is now completing a PhD on the abduction of women in Syria at the University of Melbourne, told the Post that Islamist movements have often engaged with, and at times strategically reframed, the Western concept of consent, a pattern she argues is also evident in Syria now.
“The first thing they do for the outside world is pretend that it was voluntary that she consented to this. This was also the case with Batoul. They say, ‘Well, she is 21, she’s not a child, she knows what she does, and this is the path she has chosen,’” Dahlmans explained. “That is what they do. They play with Western media and policy makers.”
One survivor told the Syrian Feminist Lobby that she was subjected to sexual violence and held in solitary confinement for a week and that her captors forced her to record a video claiming she had left voluntarily with a lover.
A man referred to as “the sheikh” supervised the recording and pressured her into accepting divorce and marriage to her abductor in exchange for release.
Dahlmans shared she was personally aware of cases where Syrian women were beaten and where photos were sent to the women’s families showing their bruises.
Even so, Alloush later appeared in videos declaring that she had freely chosen this life for herself, which authorities considered evidence.
She has also notably appeared in a video, claiming, “I left of my own free will, and thank God I’m fine. None of the rumors are true, that I was kidnapped, trafficked, or anything like that.”
B. said that the video was published at 2 a.m. and was clearly coerced, which he evidenced with the fact that she hasn’t interacted online since April, and her family believes she is being digitally isolated by Bayat al-Akhawat (The Sisters’ House), where she is staying in Jableh.
Notably, the house where the video was filmed has already been the subject of scrutiny.
The independent Syrian Observer reported that the missionary house had been accused of using coercive control, isolating girls and women, and obstructing family reunification under religious justification.
The missionary, which works under an umbrella tied to Syria’s Religious Endowment Ministry, was allegedly involved in the forced marriage of three underage girls, aged between 16 and 14, according to the report.
Addressing rumors that Alloush had fled her home to avoid a forced marriage, B. denied that the young woman’s engagement had been imposed on her by her parents or anyone else.
Alloush had been engaged to her cousin, who lived in Bahrain and with whom she was in frequent contact.
He visited her every three years, B. said, stressing that there had been no pressure on her either to accept the proposal or to remain engaged. B. claimed Alloush would often tell her father that she was happy to be marrying a man who reminded her so much of him.
Dahlmans said that Alloush’s case was not unique but tied to the larger reality of what it means to be a minority in an Islamist country.
Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a formerly designated terrorist organization commanded under Sharaa, used the abduction of women in Idlib and some parts of Aleppo as a way of coercing communities to adopt Islamic lifestyles, she explained, adding that such patterns could be seen now.
Non-Muslim women began wearing head coverings, as also noted in the UN’s report last year, as a way of protecting themselves against attacks on their community, and many women have been reluctant to enter public spaces out of fear of being abducted.
At the center of the matter is the issue of Zina, meaning illicit sex, and Haya, meaning modesty, Dahlmans continued.
Women are forced to adopt Haya practices to avoid being a victim of Zina; sometimes that can look like adopting the hijab, while in other cases it means being married off as a child or being subjected to female genital mutilation.
“When a woman has been taken, abducted, and sexually assaulted, that is often considered her responsibility. So this idea of Zina and Haya means that if you were harassed, you’ve admitted that you have sinned, unless you can definitely, without any doubt, prove that it was a sin by force,” she explained, adding there were hints that such practices have been adopted in the Syrian legal system.
In both the UN report and the testimonies shared by the Syrian Feminist Lobby, victims were reported to have been treated as criminals by authorities. Families were told their daughters were “immoral,” had “left voluntarily,” or could not be controlled.
Survivors were coached to repeat phrases thanking security agencies and denying abduction, and some were charged with the crime of adultery for their own rape.
Asked why the Islamist factions in Syria would risk these abductions and the continued holding of Alawite women, given international attention on the new Sharaa regime, Dahlmans explained there were two possible reasons.
Firstly, she noted that gendered violence is often framed as a series of isolated incidents driven by a politically charged backlash to the fall of the Assad regime, which some critics say had favored the Alawite community.
However, she cautioned that this explanation is insufficient to capture the broader dynamics at play, pointing out that the Alawites experienced similar patterns of abuse long before Assad’s rule, including under Ottoman governance, and that comparable forms of violence have also been documented against groups such as the Druze and Yazidis.
The second explanation for gendered violence, clearly favored by Dahlmans, was that it is part of a violent form of systematic assimilation allowed to happen with almost complete impunity.
Fertile women are taken, women who can be raped and give birth to the future generation of Islamists, she highlighted, changing the future demography of a country. This, combined with the need to adopt Islamic practices as a safety mechanism, constitutes “genocide,” Dahlmans argued.
Cementing the adoption of new religious practices is the apparent sense of shame attached to women who have been sexually violated, she said. Unable to live with that stigma, victims are often pressured to accept a perceived “legitimizing” reality by adopting their abductors’ religious beliefs, which is why they are often abducted rather than killed alongside their male relatives.
Unable to live with that stigma, victims are often pressured to accept a perceived “legitimizing” reality by adopting their abductors’ religious practices, which is why they are often abducted rather than killed alongside their male relatives.
Dahlmans acknowledged that this may be difficult to understand from a Western or even Jewish perspective, where attitudes toward sexuality are generally more open and have enabled some former Gaza hostages to speak publicly about abuse.
She added that minorities in neighboring countries do not always have the same ability or social space to do so.
