Syrian detainee in Assad’s prisons give birth, attended to by a detained physician
By Ayman Hakki
Dr. Fatin Ramadan is an activist and a physician. She is a secular Syrian woman who has suffered unspeakable torment and has a story to tell. Syrian women, not just men, are being tortured and killed as we speak. Her father was detained and killed, her husband was killed by a regime sniper’s bullet, and her daughter died under regime bombardment*. Most disturbing is her first-hand account of the treatment of women detainees even pregnant women and her helping a fellow detainee give birth to a baby that was taken away never to be seen again. Today she is working full time to alleviate the plight of Syria’s women detainees. She helps escort the ones that are being let go. She finds them shelter, tries to reintroduce them to their children, and is licensed to pursue her mission at an organization in France.
When Syrians rose to peacefully try to change the oppressive methods of their regime, the regime responded with extreme violence. This led to a militarization of the opposition. A bloody civil war broke out, and a decade has passed with no end to regime oppression and insurgent push back in sight. The United States of America has put forth a vison of a change-in-regime-behavior, not regime-change. I suspect that the argument that the opposition is Islamist has won the day, and that the devil we know may be better than the devil we don’t …has become our official justification for this shift in policy.
This narrative doesn’t take into consideration women, and men, like Dr. Ramadan: Secular humanist idealists, with no ties to the Islamized opposition or the oppressive regime. Dr. Ramadan’s legal organization deliberately keeps an equal distance from both the regime and opposition, since both are detaining Syrians. It is our duty to tell the story of Syrians like her, who are looking for humanitarian help, nothing more. Syrians who find themselves in a world that has seemingly become numb to their fellow Syrians’ suffering, while it has become obsessed with the suffering of Ukrainians. We Syrian Americans empathize with the Ukrainian people but must remind others not to forget our detainees.
In conclusion:
We in the United States have recently become more and more cognoscente of gender inequality. In war, and in peace, women are getting the short end of the stick. And as a Syrian American I contend that care should be given to the global systematic abuse of women. in Syria, in Ukraine, and anywhere on earth, dictators are using criminal tactics of dominance against a population of not just enemy male combatants, but their women folk. Dr. Ramadan is an example of such tactics, she deserves our support in her mission to help Syrian (and other) female detainees, go home to their children. The time for us all to act is now, and the US is uniquely positioned to assist in this matter. Will we rise to the challenge?
