My grandmother was Kurdish. She was from Van, in what is now eastern Turkey. What my family has told me is that her parents were killed in the Ottoman-era violence there. As a child, early in the 1900s, she walked from Van to Aleppo, with an uncle and her younger sister. My aunts say she was holding her sister’s hand. Somewhere along the way, her sister was lost and never found. In Aleppo, while she was still a child, her guardians married her off to a much older man.

Her first husband wasn’t my grandfather. After they divorced, my grandfather married her, a divorced woman with two children, which was remarkably progressive for its time. My family says he loved and respected her deeply. But I wonder if he ever saw what she carried. When she died suddenly in her late sixties, it almost seemed that her body gave out. By then, the family whispers, so had her mind. I don’t know what she saw in Van, on the way to Aleppo, or after, or what any of it did to her.

No one wrote anything down, and no one ever really dealt with it. The family still says, casually, that she’s from Aleppo, as if being Kurdish, or anything she was before, didn’t matter. The erasure is unconscious, and somehow that is even more infuriating. I have fragments that I hesitate to ask my family about, and they leave questions no one can answer. Did she blame herself for losing her sister? Who decided she would marry? Did she have a choice at all?

Not behind us

She has been gone almost fifty years, and girls and women in Syria, and across the region, are still suffering because they are women and because of the community they were born into. Their trauma is being erased too.

I was strongly opposed to the Assad regime, and when it fell in December 2024, I had hope. But the men who took Damascus came from a movement that began as al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria. I tried to hope for real change, and to believe I was wrong to worry. As I watched what came next, that hope drained away.

Alawites were targeted first. Many people associated them with the old regime, which made it easier to justify violence against them. In March 2025, more than 1,400 people, mostly Alawite civilians, were killed on Syria’s coast. In June, a suicide bomber killed 25 people at a church in Damascus. In July, more than 1,700 people were killed in Swaida, the heartland of Syria’s Druze, UN investigators later found. Since around March 2025, women and girls from these communities have been disappearing.

In October, Dr. Jens Kreinath, an anthropologist at Wichita State University, published a report with the International Institute for Religious Freedom. I’ve followed his work for some time, and we’ve helped each other informally on Syria, so little in it was new to me. Still, reading it all in one place was painful. In his report, he reviews investigations by Reuters, the BBC, Amnesty and UN experts, alongside documentation by the institute he directs, and concludes that the abductions are coordinated operations. He identifies a recurring pattern: women singled out for their sect, forced to say on video that they ran away or married willingly, and families blocked by the very security forces meant to help them.

The women were taken doing ordinary things: walking to school, going to a clinic, buying bread, heading to work. Some were schoolgirls as young as eleven, others young mothers, the report says. Amnesty International documented ransom demands of $10,000 to $14,000 in two cases, and at least three likely forced marriages, one of a minor.

The official answer was to tell a different story. An official inquiry looked at 42 cases and called only one a kidnapping. The rest were recast as elopements, stays with relatives or friends, flight from domestic violence, false posts online, extortion or prostitution, and crimes by the women themselves.

According to Reuters, nearly half of the 33 women and girls who were reported abducted or missing had returned home. The women and their families declined to discuss what happened, most citing security fears. Amnesty documented families saying authorities had told them to keep quiet and ordered survivors to deny the abductions. Dr. Kreinath argues that this silence is itself a form of evidence. I know that kind of silence. My family kept one for a hundred years.

Married willingly. She’s from Aleppo. Both are easier to say than what happened, and easier to repeat.

An old practice

What ties her century to this one is an old practice. It starts when those in power stop seeing people as citizens and define them instead by their sect, their ethnicity, or whatever else sets them apart. Once a group is treated as an enemy, violence against it becomes easier to justify, and its women can be treated as belonging to the armed men who see themselves as winners. Reporting cited by Dr. Kreinath draws comparisons with the logic ISIS used against Yazidi women. The histories are different. I don’t claim my grandmother’s suffering matches what these women face. Still, I can’t read about these girls without thinking of her: a child who lost her parents and her sister and was married off before she could choose.

And when the people doing the defining are extreme, unpredictable, and free to act as they please, who can say who they will target next, or why? Their definitions don’t rest on anything fixed. The report lists Alawite, Christian, Sunni, Shi’ite, Druze and Kurdish women among the victims. Most of those taken so far are Alawite. No woman’s sect or background is a guarantee of safety.

These kidnappings are also, in part, about money. The women are treated as goods, to be ransomed, sold, married off or sexually exploited. Families get little help from the authorities, and often obstruction instead, so they pay what they can. Then they’re told to stay quiet.

I think my grandmother was one of the lucky ones. She was married off as a child, but she wasn’t sold. She found my grandfather. He was educated, and his work brought the family to Damascus. That path led, by luck, to me and to the privileges I have. Many of these women and their families won’t be that lucky.

The pattern of violence returns, across histories and communities: Armenians and Assyrians, Kurds like my grandmother, Yazidis and Christians. Syria’s Jews, a community thousands of years old, all but vanished over the last century as hostility toward them grew. Most fled after the 1947 Aleppo pogrom.

The easier story

None of us can fix this alone. But each of us can refuse the easier story, and refuse to stay quiet, because silence is what lets it happen again.

I think about these women’s families, and the children who will grow up in them. Will they have fragments too? Will anyone tell them, or will they piece it together on their own, the way I am?

My grandmother’s story reached me in fragments, a hundred years late. My daughter was born here, the great-granddaughter of the girl who walked from Van, and I want her to hear that story from me, as much of it as we can recover. These women’s stories should not take a hundred years to be told.

Image reference from the Library of Congress “A Street of New Aleppo,” dated 1898–1920