During 17 days of captivity, Leila Mohammed Ahmed witnessed, helplessly, 10 young women take their own lives after being raped by members of the Sultan Murad Brigade, a Sunni rebel faction which operates under the banner of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). The 63-year-old Kurdish woman from Afrin, the majority Kurdish enclave in northern Syria that has been occupied by Turkish-backed forces since January 2018, relayed to Al-Monitor the suffering of her fellow detainees in a telephone interview. “Some used belts to hang themselves, some pens or other sharp objects which they jabbed in their throats. Then there were the poor girls who just banged their heads against the wall until they collapsed,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed’s story is not uncommon. Across Turkish-occupied territories, a pattern of violence and criminality has been established. Turkish-backed opposition groups that once were dedicated to political causes are accused by residents of becoming criminal syndicates that kidnap for money and exploit citizens’ resources for their own gain.

“There were around 150 of us. We were given a potato with half a loaf of Syrian bread twice a day, and beaten every night from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. Each night the men would take away a few of the girls to defile them, saying, ‘We are taking you to the doctor.’ It was like a tradition,” Ahmed said of the detention facility in the SNA-occupied northern town of al-Rai, her voice swinging between grief and rage.

Ahmed was arrested because of her links to the Kurdish-led administration that formerly governed Afrin, a hilly, verdant region carpeted with olive groves and ancient ruins, before the Turkish army and its SNA allies captured Afrin in a bloody, two-month military campaign.