The war against women in Syria is brutal

Lauren Wolfe, CNN:

A woman approached me as I was rushing toward the D.C. Metro after giving a talk on rape in Syria last month. She asked in a low voice if she could share some information. She had DVDs, she said. On them were testimonies of Syrian women who'd been raped; in particular, a mother, a daughter and a sister all in one family.

In a taxi recently en route to Heathrow Airport, I was told another startling story. The driver turned to me and said, "I am Syrian. And I have a story to tell you that I keep wishing is not true."

His eyes welled up as he relayed what his neighbor said happened to a friend. The neighbor described being stopped in his car at a Syrian checkpoint on the road from Zabadani to Damascus. He said army officers told him to leave his daughter with them. My driver said he knew no other details than this, that the man had been given a horrific choice to make: leave his daughter behind, or his wife and other children would be killed in front of his eyes.

The man made a decision, the driver said. He left his daughter at the checkpoint and drove on.
I keep wishing it is not true, too, but what I told the driver that day is that his story sounds all too familiar: Of the hundreds of cases of sexualized violence against Syrian women and men I have heard and documented as the director of the Women Under Siege project at the Women's Media Center, many fit this pattern of women and girls being raped at checkpoints.

And the story from the woman in Washington falls all too neatly into the pattern of ripping apart families -- rape and other forms of sexualized violence have long been used as a tool of war to destroy not only individual bodies but entire communities. What is happening in Syria is no exception. 

In an attempt to not lose a single story that could be used as possible evidence for future war crimes trials, we are documenting reports of sexualized violence on a live, crowd-sourced map on Syria. We know, however, that evidence of crimes is being destroyed every day: More than 20% of the women in our reports are found dead or are killed after rape.
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It is part of the Muslim way of war in several Middle Eastern countries.  It is a reflection of the depravity of the culture to target the wives and daughters as a way of controlling the men.  Since rape requires four males witnesses for prosecution under Shariah law, the chances of anything happening to the perps is remote if Assad stays in power.

In Egypt gangs have been paid by the "pious" Muslim Brotherhood to go out and rape women protesters.  In Afghanistan the brutal treatment of women continues despite our kicking the Taliban out.  Here is one of the latest examples:

Afghan gunmen kill polio vaccination worker in latest attack on women

It is another reason we should be trying to win this war rather than disengage.