Welcome back to Hezbollah’s Hostages, the 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.
Follow The Center for Peace Communications’ work on X @PeaceComCenter and on Instagram @PeaceComms.
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Where is the West? Where are all of the protests? Where are all of the vows to sanction? Where is the United Nations?
Nothing. Only fear of Islam. Fear of backing up words with actions.
Nothing but silence.
While it’s true that criticism of Israel isn’t in and of itself, anti-Semitic, the criticism of Israel I hear these days almost always reeks of hypocritical Jew hate.
Iran and it odious proxies are so clearly cruel, evil and hellbent on Israel’s destruction that it’s impossible to see it any other way.
What about the plight and ongoing suffering of innocent Gazans or Lebanese civilians, you ask? Simple, Israel’s enemies are to blame.
Iran will, it is said, fight Israel to the last Arab. Hamas and Hezbollah have for decades, lashed out at Israelis from behind Arab human shields. Israel’s Western critics, useful idiots all, would prefer to see Israel accept this state of war in perpetuity.
Well the Israelis prefer not to accept this insidious state of affairs. Wars have innocent victims. And every innocent victim in this war can be blamed squarely on Iran, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the Mullahs in Iran.
It’s not Israel’s fault if Jew hating lefties refuse to understand that.