BEIRUT (Dispatches) -- Nearly five months after Batoul Alloush was abducted, her Alawite parents remain in hiding in Syria, receiving death threats, simply for demanding their daughter’s return.
On April 29, Batoul texted her mother from Latakia University saying she was on the bus home, bringing medicine. That was the last normal contact. Within hours, a university administrator told her frantic mother that Batoul was “in Jableh” — a security matter. He knew she hadn’t been kidnapped just three hours after she vanished. How?
The answer leads directly to Haitham Ahmad Abbas — “Sheikh Salah al-Din” — a former Nusra Front commander who now controls security in Jableh. The university president himself admitted the “mystery” of Batoul lay with this former Al-Qaeda commander.
What followed was a grotesque theatre of coercion. Batoul appeared in a viral video wearing Afghan-style hijab, claiming she had “voluntarily” converted to Sunni Islam. The same tactic had been used before — with Mira Jalal Thabet, Mai Salim Saloum, Lana Ahmad, and Nagham Issa. All Alawite women. All “converted.” All still missing.
In a courtroom presided over by a judge visibly terrified of Sheikh Salah, Batoul appeared weak, confused, wearing a niqab, apparently fed answers through an earpiece. When her mother asked why she hadn’t brought the medicine, Sheikh Salah stormed in and declared: “If you don’t want to return to your family, no one can make you — not the state, not anyone on earth.” The judge ended the questioning.
Her father, Suleiman, was then surrounded by armed men who threatened to kill him unless he recorded a video denying his daughter’s kidnapping. They promised Batoul would be freed on Sunday. He complied. Sunday came. They refused to see him.
A 3 a.m. “press conference” followed, with Batoul paraded before pro-government journalists — including Omar al-Jablawi, who had accompanied the forces that massacred Alawites in Baniyas, where 179 civilians were slaughtered in cold blood, including 28 women and nine children.
A staged corniche video followed. Batoul carried a shopping bag from a local store — but security footage showed no niqab-wearing woman had entered. Her captors bought the data-x-items themselves, handed her the bag, and filmed the lie.
Abu Muhammad al-Jolani — Syria’s de facto president, former deputy to Daesh and second-in-command of Al-Qaeda in Iraq — leads a regime filled with former terrorists. 
His HTS is designated a terrorist organization by multiple countries. According to the UN Commission of Inquiry, at least 1,700 civilians were killed in the March 2025 coastal massacres, the vast majority Alawites. The Security Council condemned the “large-scale killing of civilians.”
This is not isolated crime. This is a kidnapping and enslavement system protected by the Jolani apparatus. Alawite women are abducted, raped, and forced to “convert.” Those who speak out face retaliation — Mira Thabet’s father was attacked in his barbershop with a grenade, killing two young men and wounding him and his son.
Batoul now sends WhatsApp voice messages defending her captor. Her parents believe she has been raped and broken into Stockholm Syndrome. They remember she witnessed her schoolmate Zain Issa killed alongside his grandfather and brother. They remember her terror.