IDLIB, Syria (North Press) – Though Sirin was aware of the risks of marrying a foreigner fighting with Islamic groups in northwest Syria, she had no choice but to say yes.
Sirin Mustafa (a pseudonym), 31, from the city of Harem in north of Idlib, married a French jihadist who was on good terms with her father, as they fought together the trenches.
After her French husband was killed in battles in late 2018 in the east of Hama, she took her three children, the eldest of whom is seven, and was moved into a camp for widows near the city of Harem. She faces a difficult situation as she has no breadwinner to support her. She lives off the monthly food parcels provided by humanitarian organizations, which do not exceed $25 in value and lasts only a few days.
She said that in April 2014, a 38-year-old foreigner came to her family’s house with her father. Her father explained to her that the French man’s name was Abu Al-Baraa al-Muhajer, and he had come to Syria a few months ago to ‘perform jihad against the Syrian regime’ and wanted to get married.
“I was stunned when my father told me he wanted to marry me off to this man and began to praise him. I still cannot believe how my father, who I saw as a reasonable man, praised a person he only knew for a few months. I was forced to marry him because I could not say no to my father in a community that does not take no for an answer,” Sirin added.
After nearly a month, she married him. They lived together for five years and had three children, until he was killed in an airstrike during battles that erupted in the north of Hama. Sirin became a widow with three children who do not know their father, whose nickname is all their mother knows about him.
“My French husband left no identification papers or even some money to buy a house or even a tent to shelter my children and me. I had no idea what was in store for me. I could not live with my parents as they already went through bad economic conditions and can barely manage to get by,” she said.
The biggest issue for me is that “my children are considered of unknown parentage. Organizations refused to give me a house to live in without identification papers,” she noted.
She tried the institutions of the Salvation Government of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS – formerly al-Nusra Front), but they refused to issue identification papers to her. After many hardships, she was able to forge the papers and got a house built by one of the organizations operating in the camps of Harem.
Hundreds of girls like Sirin from various areas in Syria married men of different nationalities – including France, Malaysia, the Gulf States, and African countries, according to rough statistics.
Some marriages failed, and others ended up with their husband killed in battle, leaving the wife caring for their children, without identification papers or an inheritance to support them.
Sara al-Hussein (a pseudonym), 28, is not so different from Sirin. She married a Tunisian ‘muhajir’ after her husband of seven years, who was also her cousin, was killed.
Sara married the Tunisian muhajir in August 2018. He was her family’s neighbor in Idlib. He asked for her hand in marriage after getting to know her brothers and father.
The Tunisian showed his good side to Sara and her family, saying he left his country for Syria “to do jihad and defend the religion of Allah,” she said.
Sara’s family consented to marry her off to the Tunisian without asking her, on the pretext that she was a widow and must not remain without a husband. “I had no choice but to accept. My family is fanatic; to them, a widow or a divorced woman is the weakest link in the community and must not remain unmarried,” she added.
“The thing that made me more apprehensive was that I heard many stories of women who lost their foreign husbands either in battles or were arrested by the HTS or returned to their original countries and left their wives and children behind. What I was afraid of came true,” she noted.
After a year and a half, “I was seven months pregnant. My husband told me he was secretly leaving Idlib for Turkey for a private matter. I suggested going with him, but he refused.”
Days later he left, “and to this day, I do not know anything about him, as there is no means to communicate with him. I realized he went back to his country after finishing his mission. Now I am raising his one-and-a-half-year-old son,” she added.
There is no precise statistic on the number of Syrian women who married foreign jihadists, or of their children. However, unofficial sources told North Press that the numbers of women in Idlib alone exceeds 1.000 and that of their children 4.000 – most of whom suffer under dire economic and living conditions.
Many families in areas under the control of opposition factions and the HTS in northwest Syria, driven by poverty, marry off their daughters at a young age – some as young as 16 – especially to foreigners who pay large sums of money. Their excuse is that it is easier to rehabilitate the girls and raise them in a way that is suitable for them, in addition to instilling their extreme ideology in their unshaped minds.
In June 2021, an Algerian ‘muhajir’, 45, called Abu Qutada al-Jazrawi, offered to marry Rim al-Najem, 17 years old at the time, taking advantage of her family’s destitution.
He offered Rim’s father $10.000 to marry off his daughter. The father refused initially, but later pressured her into accepting the proposal. They were married for four months; he later divorced her and sent her back to her parents.
Rim said she could not sue her Algerian husband, who had a lot of influence in the courts affiliated with the HTS, and her family’s situation did not improve, either – which had been the reason she married him in the first place.