Nepali villager Sunita Magar thought she was heading to a safe factory job in Kuwait, but only when she landed in Damascus did she realise “something had gone very wrong”.
Nepali villager Sunita Magar thought she was heading to a safe factory job in Kuwait, but only when she landed in Damascus did she realise “something had gone very wrong”.
Frequently beaten with a baton and given only one meal a day, Ms Magar says she spent 13 months working as a maid for a Syrian household and pleading to be allowed to go home. “I was just in shock, I couldn’t stop crying,” the single mother-of-two said.
Ms Magar is among scores of poor Nepali and Bangladeshi women who travelled to the Middle East on the promise of a good job, only to be trafficked into Syria.
Nepal’s top diplomat in the region said nationals from the Philippines, Indonesia and other countries, which, like Nepal and Bangladesh, have large migrant labour populations, stopped working in Syria because of the dangers involved. “Since then traffickers have been targeting Nepalis,” said Kaushal Kishor Ray, head of Nepal’s diplomatic mission based in Cairo. “The numbers have gone up hugely in recent years, we estimate there must be around 500 Nepali women in Syria,” Mr Ray said.
In Bangladesh, Shahinoor Begum lies in a Dhaka hospital bed recovering from her seven-month ordeal after being trafficked into Syria as a sex slave. “I was sold to a Syrian man who tortured and raped me every day, sometimes along with his friends,” Begum, also a single mother-of-two, said.
“I begged for mercy, but they didn’t have any. Instead they used to beat me so badly that I broke my arms,” she said.
Accompanied by labour agents, the 28-year-old and several other women left Bangladesh on the promise of working as maids in Jordan. But they too were taken to Syria, where fighting between the regime and rebel forces has left more than 2,70,000 dead and displaced more than half the population.
Lt. Col. Golam Sarwar said his team from Bangladesh’s elite Rapid Action Battalion are investigating her case and two others — although families of 43 other women have lodged similar complaints.
