Stories of women entering Syria on a “Sex Jihad” have taken the media by storm. But are any of them actually true?
Leila, 23, still blushes when she talks about her first kiss. Now heavily pregnant with her first child, she says she didn’t even hold hands with a boy until she met her husband.
“I come from a rural area, I am a modest woman, a believer,” she says. “You understand that my husband and I were both very innocent when we were married. That is why this whole story, this crazy sex jihad thing is so so shocking.”
Leila is one of hundreds of women who have been accused of going on a “Sex Jihad” in Syria. Last month, her parents appeared on a local Tunisian television network to speak about their “lost daughter.” Her mother stands silently as her father tearfully recounts how his daughter was led astray to “prostitute herself to Syrian dogs.”
The video was one of many quoted by Tunisia's interior minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou when he promised to stem the phenomenon of Tunisian women traveling to Syria to wage “sex jihad” where they were having sex with “20, 30, [or] 100″ militants, before returning pregnant to Tunisia. Sex jihad, or Jihad al-nikah, permits extramarital sexual relations with multiple partners, and is considered by some hardline Sunni Muslim Salafists as a legitimate form of holy war.
“After the sexual liaisons they have there in the name of Jihad al-nikah they come home pregnant,” said Ben Jeddou, though he declined to name any specific cases.
Leila, who asked that her real name and details of her identity remain private, says that the entire story is a lie. The only part that is true is that two years ago she left her small village in Tunisia to volunteer as a nurse among the Syrian rebels fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
It was there that she met her husband.
“We met and we got married – in an Islamic wedding recognized by the court – and we made a home together,” said Leila. “My family in Tunisia did not accept this, and this is very hard. But they know I am a married woman and not some prostitute on a sex jihad!”
Her husband is currently in Syria fighting among the rebels in Homs. Leila shares a small apartment in the northern Jordanian city of Ramthe with three other Syrian families.
“It was a scandal and some people maybe they believed these lies. But most people knew these were disgusting things said by the regime to try and make our fighters, our husbands, look dirty,” said Leila. “We do not know of any sex jihad here and we have not seen it. It is something invented in the mind of perverted people.”
She is not the only woman who has come forward and discredit the notion that women are flocking to Syria on a sex jihad.
A few days ago, the Al Arabiya network revealed several cases of Syrian women who had accused Syrian rebels of rape, when they were actually kidnapped by Syrian state security forces.
Rawan Qadah accused her father of “selling his honor” to the Syrian rebels and allowing her to be raped, and Sarah Khaled al-Alawo said she had spent months catering to the rebels as a “sexual jihadist.” Both women's families, however, later said that the women had been kidnapped and held by government security forces and were forced to tell false stories of rape at the hands of the rebels.
Another story, aired by Iran's Press TV last week was widely discredited after it claimed that a Syrian women had set herself and her children on fire after being raped by Syrian rebels in a Turkish refugee camp.
International humanitarian groups and Turkish authorities who work with the Syrian refugee community in Turkey told Buzzfeed that there is no known case of self-immolation in the camps, and that the story had no basis in reality.
The report only quoted one person, Turkish journalist Adil Haciomerogl, who has in the past espoused extreme views on the Syrian rebels on his blog and on his Twitter account.
A still picture shown during the Press TV report that claimed to show the said woman on fire, appears to have been lifted from a BBC report on spontaneous human combustion.
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