“The Philippines’ ‘Heroes’ Trafficked to War-Torn Syria” Read more
… Cayamba was one of 54 women who, between 2019 and 2021, sought help and shelter at the Philippine embassy in Damascus amid the COVID-19 pandemic. After more than a decade in Syria, the pursuit of justice for what happened to her has consumed every single day of the life she has had to rebuild from scratch…
“I had a lot of orientation, training. I thought it was legal. But when I was in Kuwait, someone told me ‘you will go to Syria,’” she says. “I know there is a war in Syria, but I didn’t have a choice, I didn’t have money then. How can I go back to the Philippines? I didn’t have one burden on me.”
It took eight years of overwork, mistreatment, bad food and poor sleep before she decided enough was enough and sought help from the Philippine Embassy in Damascus, just ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two years later, she finally made it back home, where everything had changed…
These days, when she is not chasing down migration officials, Cayamba is attending rallies, or even organizing workshops in her neighborhood for people who are preparing to travel abroad, or for returning OFWs who are trying to navigate the complex system of financial reintegration support or filing claims against rogue agencies…
“[My employer] in Aleppo only paid me $200 a month. They said the other half was going to the agency,” says 47-year-old Alcala. In 2017, she left her hometown near Manila to help her three sons through higher education; she is also a single mother. Like many other Filipinos who migrate abroad, she chose to use the fastest and most economical intermediary, recommended by an acquaintance whom she believed she could trust. The informal “agent,” a woman she calls Ann, promised her a job in the Gulf. However, rather than assisting her in obtaining a work visa, she arranged for her to fly to the United Arab Emirates on a tourist visa.
It was only in Aleppo that she was finally paid $200 a month, half of the promised wage, which she says the employer would wire directly to her family. The minimum wage in the Philippines is currently $230 a month.“I never got enough food, sometimes I was given rotten food,” she says. “My employer said she could only pay me $200 because Maher took the other half. … After two years, my employer told me she’d already bought me and that I had to stay with her for six years. Then I decided to escape.”
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that before the war began, there were between 10,000 and 15,000 foreign domestic workers in Syria, with the majority coming from the Philippines, Indonesia and Ethiopia.
While Syria banned manpower agencies, they continued to operate underground, either “from a neighboring country or illegally within Syria,” according to an IOM report. Workers are normally asked to sign new contracts on arrival that cancel any previous agreement they had with agencies back home.
While the exact number of Filipinos who have traveled to Syria since the war started remains unclear, available data and anecdotal evidence suggest that the 54 women whose cases have come to light may just be the tip of the iceberg. In 2021, the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines said it brought home 110 trafficked Filipinos from Syria. The Philippine Embassy in Damascus continued to repatriate women in 2023, according to its website, but did not respond to a request for further information and comment.
Of the four women who were trafficked with Sidik to Syria via Malaysia, only one eventually knocked on the embassy’s door. The fates of the others remain unknown to her. The youngest was 15…
“Some of the [Syria] victims have also filed cases against their traffickers,” says Joanna Conception, Philippines chairperson of Migrante, a global coalition of migrant workers that is also offering legal aid to some of the victims. “But the problem was, especially those who were recruited or trafficked as minors are not familiar with the law, they don’t know their rights, and did not really receive support from the Philippine government agencies for the filing of their cases,” she says, adding that some have also reported intimidation and harassment from individuals connected to their traffickers…
Critics, however, say the framework, whereby the government essentially relies on private agencies to self-regulate, is part of the problem. According to a senate communique, in 2016 the conviction rate for illegal recruitment cases in the Philippines was a dismal 5.3%. Rebecca Miller, head of the Asia section of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime says that while the Philippines, with its long history of and reliance on migration, has worked a lot more than other countries on strengthening its anti-trafficking framework and promoting “ safe migration,” challenges persist.
“Being able to collect that evidence that often sits in another country to then prosecute individuals or carry out investigations of operators in the Philippines can be incredibly challenging as it often requires cooperation with these countries,” she tells New Lines . “Even more generally, international legal cooperation in relation to trafficking cases is very few and far between.” (reprinted from Business & Human Rights Resource Center and News Line Magazine)
