ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Three Kurdish girls, including a German citizen, have been kidnapped in a Damascus-held area east of Syria’s northern Aleppo province over the weekend, a family member and an activist confirmed to Rudaw on Tuesday, adding that the captors have yet to issue any demands, while the fate and whereabouts of the young women remain unknown.
Two of the abducted girls are identified as German national Norman Jalal and her friend Fatima Salih, both originally from Kobane, a Kurdish-majority city in northern Syria.
Mustafa Adil, Norman’s relative, told Rudaw on Monday that she was scheduled to return to Hanover, Germany - where she and her family reside - within ten days, after a visit to Kobane.
Norman, who works as an esthetician, “had traveled from Kobane to Aleppo at 6 pm [local time] on Saturday to buy some supplies for work,” Adil said. She was driving a black vehicle with Kobane license plates, he detailed, noting that she and her friend crossed from Tabqa district, located west of northeast Syria (Rojava), to Deir Hafer east of Aleppo.
Deir Hafer is a strategic area that has recently witnessed intermittent clashes between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and armed factions aligned with the Damascus government. It is largely under SDF. Tabqa is also governed by the Kurdish-led Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) in Rojava, and has a strong SDF presence. The US-backed Kurdish forces serve as Rojava’s de facto military force.
Damascus-affiliated factions are pushing to seize Deir Hafer as it would enable them to open a logistical corridor to Raqqa province in north-central Syria and put military pressure on the SDF in Tabqa and other regions crucial for the Kurdish forces’ operations. These regions include the Tishreen Dam and Qere Qozaq west of Rojava, which militia groups supported by Ankara failed to capture late last year despite months of intense fighting.
After Norman and her friend “exited the areas controlled by the [SDF] comrades heading to Aleppo, we lost connection with them after they entered [Damascus-held areas],” Adil said. He elaborated that the two Kurdish girls were captured at a checkpoint held by an armed militia “before entering Aleppo.”
On Sunday evening, the kidnappers contacted Norman's family confirming she had been abducted for a ransom in return for her release, without specifying an exact sum.
During the phone call, the abductors allowed her father to speak with her on the phone. “Her voice on the phone did not sound well,” Adil said, adding that Norman’s father “asked how much money they wanted. They said they would inform us later," he added, noting, “We have not heard from them [abductors] since.”
While it remains unclear whether the kidnapping was premeditated, Adil noted that the vehicle’s Kobane license plates may have made it easy for the armed group to identify the two young women as Kurds from Rojava.
Norman’s family has reached out to both the German diplomatic mission in Damascus and the Kurdish-led SDF, Adil said, but refrained from contacting Syrian authorities, fearing potential arrest.
For its part, Rudaw has notified the Syrian interior ministry, which said it “would investigate the case.”
Efforts by Rudaw to reach the family of Norman’s friend, Fatima, have until the time of this report, been unsuccessful.
Another Kurdish girl from Kobane, Haifa Adil Taher, was also abducted on the same day as Norman and Fatima and in the same area.
Ibrahim Shekho, a prominent Kurdish human rights activist in Rojava, told Rudaw English that the 25-year-old is from the village of Khirabe Ato in Kobane.
“On Saturday, around 9 and 10 am [local time], Haifa was travelling from Kobane to Aleppo to visit her family in the [Kurdish-majority] Sheikh Maqsood neighborhood in [northern] Aleppo.”
However, “she was abducted at a checkpoint located between Aleppo [city] and Deir Hafir,” Shekho said, adding that “her family has reached out to the SDF to help secure her release, but her fate remains unknown.”
Given that all three girls were abducted within hours of each other in the same region raises serious concerns that the cases may be connected and possibly the work of the same armed militia.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that some 1,647 persons have been abducted or disappeared since the start of 2025.
Rami Abdulrahman, head of SOHR, told Rudaw on Tuesday that “292 kidnappings were recorded in areas controlled by the Damascus government, while 63 occurred in territories held by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA)."
SOHR had previously attributed such violations to various motives, including “political and security repression.”
The war monitor said that in addition to targeting individuals suspected of ties to the regime of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, “abductions are increasingly being used as a tool to terrorize civilians, assert control over territories and blackmail families for money or information.”
The UK-based war monitor, which relies on a network of local sources inside Syria, warned that the ongoing “lack of oversight, accountability, and transparency surrounding the fate of detainees and abductees” only emboldens perpetrators to continue these practices.
It called for “the immediate disclosure” of the fate of all missing persons and urged the formation of an independent international investigation committee to examine the widespread human rights violations.
Nalin Hassan contributed to this report.