You’ll have no doubt by now picked up on the rumour that Muslim, in particular Tunisian women are flocking en masse to the war front in Syria to provide for the heterosexual needs of the Syrian rebels on the ground. The phenomenon of jihad al-Nikkah (more like Jihad al-Nookie, amiright?) has been wholly accepted and widely reported by Western Press. There’s just one problem: It isn’t true.

So, where did the rumour come from?

Last week, AFP and Al Arabiya reported that the Tunisian Interior Minister, Lotfi ben Jouddou mentioned in in an address to the National Assembly last Thursday that Tunisian women were being lured into a sexual Jihad in Syria, and having sex with “20, 30, 100” rebels, eventually returning to Tunisia pregnant.

Of course, the American press saw “sex” and “muslim” in the same sentence, and the story swept across the internet like so much sexy wildfire.

Here’s a brief list of outlets who ran aggressive reports on the statement: The Atlantic, TIME, Business Insider, Global Post, Jezebel, Huffington Post, Daily Beast. So, that’s enough to go “viral”, then.

The problem with the statement is that there’s no proof to it. More’s the pity, the claim makes no sense, given that a large body of evidence already exists to confirm that a sizeable number of female rebel combatants are already on the front, negating the need for sexual reinforcements, as it were.

Lauren Wolfe, director of Women Under Siege said:

We’ve seen all kinds of horrors in this war though, so who’s to say whether this is happening too. Then again, we’ve also seen massive amounts of propaganda tainting both sides in this conflict. So who’s to say this isn’t more of that?

Ruth Michaelson, a freelance reporter who spent time in Syria in September 2012 and has written extensively about the role of sexual exploitation in the conflict, said:

The first thought that struck me on this is that now that Western media has exhausted the vein of “female refugees being…exploitatively married to men from the Gulf”-type stories, this is the new wave. It seems like there has to be a story in the Western media that plays into the dynamic of sexually rampant Arab men and submissive women, and this is the 2.0 version.

As with the 1.0 version it’s not to say that there is not a problem. In the case of sexual exploitation of women in refugee camps, there are definitely problems happening, but the framing of the issues in the media made it sound like a pandemic of uncontrollable sexual violence. This was actively unhelpful- it made the…occurring problems more difficult to locate and discuss sensitively [and] it also was framed in the media in a way that directly disenfranchised and silenced Syrian women, portraying them as unending numbers of mute and stupid victims of sexually voracious men…

Back in your box, rumour-mongers.

[Source : PolicyMic]