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| Militant Islamist fighters take part in a military parade in Syria's northern Raqqa province in this June 30, 2014, file photo. The Islamic State has set up departments to handle "war spoils," including slaves, and the exploitation of natural resources |
The news agency's report cited a senior Bangladeshi official from the Rapid Action Battalion, an elite police agency, who claimed that his unit came across about 45 cases last year involving women who had been taken to the war-ravaged Middle Eastern country, tricked, exploited and, in some cases, raped and abused.
Some 8 million Bangladeshis work overseas; a considerable number of them are employed as construction and domestic labor in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Many of the women taken to Syria -- and it's not clear from the report where in the country they have been trafficked -- likely migrated with the understanding that they had jobs lined up in Jordan, Lebanon or elsewhere, and from there were coerced into going to Syria.
Reuters has more:
"It started with one woman called Shahinoor who escaped from her captors in Syria. She called her mother who complained to us," Commander Khadaker Golam Sarowar of RAB-3 told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Monday.Last week, local media reports in Bangladesh detailed raids carried out by the RAB on suspected human trafficking cells, though it's unclear whether the arrests made had any connection to the cases linked to Syria.
"Shahinoor was supposed to go to Lebanon. Instead she was taken to Dubai with five other women, and then on to Syria where she was sold to different people -- sometimes to work as a maid, sometimes for sex. She told us there were others."
Sarowar said the 34-year-old woman was "extremely sick and unable to move." Bangladeshi officials in Syria flew her to Dhaka where she is being treated for a kidney illness, he added.
The miserable, five-year conflict in Syria has seen the rise of the jihadist Islamic State, which has carried out mass abductions of women, particularly in Iraq. Many of these women, including some teenage girls, have been forced into a widespread system of rape and enslavement by the militants.