A Hezbollah Sex Slave Tells Her Story
A Hezbollah Sex Slave Tells Her Story
The first victim of Hezbollah’s massive sex trafficking operation ever to speak out prompts Arab demands to hold the terror group accountable.
Defending Women and Girls
Makram Rabah: Feminist and LGBT Activists Who Raise Hamas and Hezbollah Banners Must Listen to Alya’s Story
Episode 2 of Hezbollah’s Hostages, a Center for Peace Communications production released today by The Free Press, features the testimony of Alya, a happily married 20-year-old living in the Syrian city of Raqqa who caught the eye of a Hezbollah operative. In telling her story of abduction and enslavement, Alya is the first victim of Hezbollah’s massive human trafficking operations ever to come forth.
Click here to watch Alya’s testimony in “The Sex Slave.”
We asked Makram Rabah, a history professor at the American University of Beirut, to share his reflections on Alya’s testimony:
Growing up during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) and later dedicating my career to studying its harrowing episodes of violence, I've encountered numerous accounts of human suffering. As a young boy, I spent days at a time hiding in bomb shelters; my parents would wake us up in the middle of the night to flee for safety. Yet the stories that shock me the most are crimes of sexual violence, whether committed during war or at other times. In conservative Mediterranean societies, victims often remain silent to avoid bringing shame upon their clans and communities.
In June 2022, 32 years after the civil war ended, the human rights organization Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) released a comprehensive report documenting systematic violence against Lebanese and Palestinian women and girls by various factions during the 15 years of conflict. The use of rape as a weapon against communities remains an almost genocidal crime – a weapon which all Lebanese militias, across the Muslim-Christian divide, used against each other to shame and humiliate the other. These women were violated not only physically but also psychologically, as they were denied justice and silenced.
The same feelings of horror engulfed me when I watched the second episode of Hezbollah’s Hostages, an animated video featuring the actual recorded voice of Alya, a 20-year-old woman from Raqqa, Syria. Alya was abducted and forced into prostitution by Hezbollah, Iran's Lebanese militia. Recently married and living in Damascus, her life was shattered when her husband went missing. Desperate to find him, she sought help from Yousef, a Hezbollah member in her neighborhood. Despite knowing his bad intentions, she was driven by hope and desperation.
Alya’s ordeal began when Yousef took her to a farm under the pretense of finding her husband. Instead, she was raped and forced to endure six months of sex slavery, along with other girls, some as young as 16. Her brother eventually rescued her, paying $10,000 to free her from this nightmare.
Hezbollah – and the so-called “Axis of Resistance” supporting it – claim to uphold moral and ethical values in their fight against oppression. But their actions, as in Alya’s case, reveal a stark contradiction. Mounting evidence over the past decade implicates Hezbollah and Iran in institutionalized narcotics and human trafficking activities. These operations have generated billions in revenue and established extensive money laundering networks.
In February 2019, Lebanese authorities uncovered a prostitution ring in the Bekaa Valley, revealing the involvement of senior Hezbollah members. This was one of many crimes for which Hezbollah has never been held accountable, including a vast network of criminal activities and outfits along the Lebanese and Syrian borders. The latter generates billions of dollars from smuggling merchandize as well as trafficking in refugees, who pay large sums of money to access Lebanon from the same routes that Hezbollah uses to gain entry into Syria.
The residents of many Syrian villages on the eastern border with Lebanon have meanwhile been displaced by Hezbollah – driven from their homes, perhaps never to return again. It is these refugees whom Hezbollah and its members have been preying on, driving young men and women into a life of crime and ruin.
Behind Hezbollah’s façade of piety lies a terror group that doubles as a transnational crime syndicate – and uses a wide array of religious fatwas (legal rulings) to justify murder and even the sexual enslavement of young women like Alya.
Hezbollah's involvement in the Syrian civil war on behalf of Bashar al-Assad opened new avenues for their criminal enterprises, ranging from human and narcotics trafficking to the weapons trade. Leading Iran’s expansionist project across the Middle East, Hezbollah has also constructed a sinister yet impressive shadow economy which conceals its elaborate network of organized crime. While Hezbollah’s leader invades our living rooms and screens with his condescending, pompous, and self-righteous sermons and threats of regional Armageddon, his men who are supposed to be holy warriors and freedom fighters are indulging in debauchery, as Alya’s story reflects.
Iran and its proxies have also sought to evade accountability by presenting themselves as a bulwark against Sunni jihadists like al-Qaeda and ISIS. Yet the political DNA of these groups is strikingly similar. Western apologists for the Iranian axis, together with people who are simply uninformed, must face up to the fact that Hezbollah's and ISIS's crimes, including sexual enslavement and human trafficking, are fundamentally the same. Furthermore, the abysmal human rights record of Hezbollah’s parent regime in Tehran, exemplified by the killing of Mahsa Amini and other Iranian opposition activists, underscores that this commonality of vice runs all the way to the top of the terror hierarchy.
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The ideology of the Tehran regime, contrary to what it tries to promote or project, features a bedrock commitment to subjugating women and minorities, and is itself criminal.
Ironically, Hezbollah claimed early on in its involvement in the Syrian civil war that it was fighting to protect Shi’ite religious shrines from desecration and ruin – but Youssef, Alya’s Hezbollah captor, was no holy warrior; he was a slave trader and a pimp.
The October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent events saw feminists and LGBT activists shamefully displaying Hamas and Hezbollah banners, viewing these groups as anti-imperialist forces. They seem to have overlooked the systemic abuse and suppression of human and women's rights as practiced by both these terror groups as well as the Tehran regime that backs them. Over the past 11 months, many honest and rational people, swept up in populist rhetoric, forgot that supporting the rights of Palestinians must not come at the expense of other oppressed nations — let alone whitewash Hezbollah pimps like Yousef.
Alya’s struggle for justice is a poignant reminder that the world must not forget the Syrian people's suffering and the true perpetrators of their ongoing plight.
Makram Rabah is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, Department of History. His book Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, the Maronites and Collective Memory (Edinburgh University Press) covers collective identities and the Lebanese Civil War.