‘She’s not coming back’: Alawite women snatched from streets of Syria

WORLD

‘She’s not coming back’: Alawite women snatched from streets of Syria

Fidaa al-Eissa hangs a rug to dry on the rooftop of her home, surrounded by the wreckage left by the civil war, in the Qaboun neighborhood of Damascus on Feb. 21. | David Guttenfelder / The New York Times

By Maggie Michael
Reuters

Jun 30, 2025

DAMASCUS – “Don’t wait for her,” the WhatsApp caller told the family of Abeer Suleiman on May 21, hours after she vanished from the streets of the Syrian town of Safita. “She’s not coming back.”

Suleiman’s kidnapper and another man who identified himself as an intermediary said in subsequent calls and messages that the 29-year-old woman would be killed or trafficked into slavery unless her relatives paid them a ransom of $15,000.

“I am not in Syria,” Suleiman herself told her family in a call on May 29 from the same phone number used by her captor, which had an Iraqi country code. “All the accents around me are strange.”