July 31, 2025
This report examines the experience of Syrian female journalists who have been subjected to smear campaigns and threats because of their ethnic identity, especially after covering political or social issues.
Lamar Arkandy, a 36-year-old journalist, was accused of fabrication and misinformation after an Arab TV channel carried her report on female slaves in the city of Idlib, controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra.
At the same time her report was aired, in mid-2023, there were protests in the city led by a group of women demanding the release of political prisoners held by HTS.
Arkandy says she made her report “in support of Syrian women in those areas. I talked about the abuse they suffered in prison and about the existence of a slave market.”
Her personal Facebook page was inundated with abusive comments and she says she received numerous death threats, and warnings she would be kidnapped, abducted or arrested. Beside these libellous threats, Arkandy faced calls for her arrest in Turkey and in opposition-controlled areas of Syria. “They were calling on the Turkish government to kill or arrest me,” she says.
Lamar Arkandy says that the attacks on her have always been linked to her Kurdish identity: “I’m Syrian before I’m Kurdish.” She is far from the only journalist to have suffered this type of attack. Fronak Shikhi, a 38-year-old correspondent for Al-Mashhad TV in Qamishli, says her ethnicity has brought her many problems.
Having covered the war against Daesh and visited the camps where Daesh members live, as well as prisons and detention centers, she acknowledges that this type of work brings with it many dangers. But these are heightened by the fact that she is a woman working in a conflict zone.
Journalist Razan Ahmed (not her real name) has similar concerns, though for different reasons. She is too afraid to travel to Damascus to complete her studies, thinking this could lead to her being arrested, because she previously worked for a local news agency in the autonomous region of north-eastern Syria.
Syrian journalist Jano Shaker thinks online threats and blackmail that media workers face stem from their role as “watchdogs” - exposing mistakes and shedding light on failings and corruption.
He points out that these threats have even more of an impact when it comes to female journalists: “Online threats don’t only affect the personal safety and security of female journalists, but also damage their social standing and reputation.”
He goes on to say, “When this happens, female journalists seem to be less fortunate than their male counterparts and less able to withstand such threatening behaviour. This is not through discrimination, or because social norms favour male journalists, but because women usually find the institutions they work for have no support mechanisms or well-understood procedures for dealing with this.”
The results of a survey of 714 female journalists conducted in 2020 by the International Center for Journalists in collaboration with UNESCO show that female journalists who belong to ethnic groups or have certain religious orientations are more at risk of online violence.
Psychologist Rojin Shawish says that the threatening behaviour has a more complex effect on individuals who are less resilient than others Shawish adds that “Threats of murder, kidnap or arrest can cause greater psychological stress in people who lack mental resilience. And this produces a range of psychological symptoms.”
She warns that such mental stress often develops into shock, which is accompanied by physical symptoms like persistent headaches, pains in the stomach, joint and back pain, and general lethargy. The journalist may respond by becoming socially isolated or stop practising her usual religious rituals.
Omar Alasaad, communications officer at the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, argues that online threats are having a negative effect on the work of journalists in Syria. This is because they target both men and women working in this field, given the plentiful supply of firearms, rampant corruption and score-settling, and the lack of a nurturing and supportive social environment.
These threats may drive female journalists to work in other, safer fields to avoid exposure to such abuse, according to Al-Asaad.
Human rights activist Khaled Jabr thinks the Syrian crisis has exacerbated the suffering of female journalists, because of the threats and abuse they face, either because of the position they have taken on a particular issue, or because of the orientation of the media outlets they work for.
Jaber says that opposition-controlled areas of Syria are among the most fragile in terms of security and rule of law, and that the presence of radical organisations makes them an unsafe environment for female journalists to work in. He adds that the lack of any legal protection against cyberattacks makes the state of human rights even worse.
He thinks that the enactment of the Cybercrime Law of 2022 in government-controlled areas is a positive step that could deter online blackmailers, but that chaos, corruption and lack of security is stopping the law from being enforced since the change of the regime.
Khaled Jabr, an expert in international law, thinks the particular division of Syria into different regions, each controlled by a different group, explains the difficulty of bringing perpetrators to account and enforcing the law. If there is a dispute or if a court has made a ruling, the law that applies in the autonomous region, for example, cannot be enforced in opposition-held areas, if the perpetrator is in a region outside their control.
Jaber points to another mechanism that can bring perpetrators to justice, especially if they are proteges of those in power in a particular region. This is to make use of the universal jurisdiction of some international courts, like the courts in Belgium, where charges can be brought. Legal proceedings, however, depend on knowing and clearly identifying the perpetrator.He points out, “Sometimes we are faced with fictitious and non-existent people, so the victim may be known, but the perpetrator is not, or vice versa.”
Lamar Arkandy says she has received support from several sources. The Free Media Union (an independent professional trade union operating in northern and eastern Syria) put out a statement condemning the attacks on Arkandy, and organised a protest in Raqqa to which a number of media workers and journalists from different regions came.
The Violations Monitoring and Documentation Office at the Syrian Kurdish Journalists Network, meanwhile, has condemned social media attacks on female journalists - whether they are from people using a false name, or from channels and media platforms affiliated controlled by radical and extremist armed factions. According to the statement by the network, threats of rape, sexual harassment and intimidation have become a daily occurrence.
The website of the channel that featured Arkandy's report deleted it three days after it was posted, but it was circulated on a number of other media outlets and platforms.
This report was published in Arabic in: Yemen Future / Al-aalem Al-jadeed / Nukhbeh Post / Sharika Wa Laken / Muwatin / Daraj | Mada News
