Welcome back to Hezbollah’s Hostages, the powerful animated video series that each week brings you the stories of brave people—in their own voices—risking their lives to resist the tyranny of the terror group in Arab lands.
Last week’s episode, “The Combatant,” told the story of a Hezbollah fighter who became a voice of resistance. Today, we present the story of Alya, a happily married, 20-year-old woman living in the city of Raqqa, Syria, who caught the eye of a Hezbollah operative. The story of her abduction and enslavement in “Episode 2: The Sex Slave” sheds unprecedented light on Hezbollah’s sex- and human-trafficking operations, which prey on the very people it claims to protect.
Recall that Hamas raped and abused the women it took captive after invading southern Israel in a single, terrible day. Now consider that Hezbollah has enjoyed such power for decades in its native Lebanon and for years in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
Hezbollah enslaves women en masse to fund its war machine and enrich party elites. The U.S. Treasury Department has sanctioned two senior Hezbollah financiers whose crimes include sex trafficking: One ran a prostitution network of predominantly Syrian women in Lebanon, and the other smuggled Gambian women to buyers in multiple Arab countries.
“The senior leadership of Hezbollah hides behind a facade of piety,” observes American University of Beirut historian Makram Rabah, who writes about today’s episode in a separate essay. “It uses a wide array of religious fatwas—legal rulings—to justify the sexual enslavement of Alya and other young women, among the many crimes for which the group has never been held accountable.”
Alya is the first victim of Hezbollah’s massive human trafficking operations ever to come forth. She is breaking her silence and speaking out to encourage other women to come forward. Through Hezbollah’s Hostages, produced by our partners at The Center for Peace Communications, she is being heard far and wide.
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