Executive Editor for Lez Get Real, Paula Brooks, has passed along disturbing distressing news – Amina Abdallah Arraf the publisher of A Gay Girl In Damascus and contributor to LGR is missing and has apparently been abducted. From Amina’s blog, her cousin wrote on June 6:

Earlier today, at approximately 6:00 pm Damascus time, Amina was walking in the area of the Abbasid bus station, near Fares al Khouri Street. She had gone to meet a person involved with the Local Coordinating Committee and was accompanied by a friend.

Amina told the friend that she would go ahead and they were separated. Amina had, apparently, identified the person she was to meet. However, while her companion was still close by, Amina was seized by three men in their early 20′s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed. Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father.

One of the men then put his hand over Amina’s mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad. The witness did not get the tag number. She promptly went and found Amina’s father.

The men are assumed to be members of one of the security services or the Baath Party militia. Amina’s present location is unknown and it is unclear if she is in a jail or being held elsewhere in Damascus.

LezGetReal:

LezGetReal has been working as well behind the scenes to try and get any word we can. Amina’s first post on LGR was about “HALFWAY OUT OF THE DARK”: ON BEING A GAY GIRL IN DAMASCUS all the way back on 15 February of this year. She came to LGR via a comment posted on an article by L.S. Carbonell about Syria. On 20 February, she set up “A Gay Girl In Damascus” and often cross posted stories on both up until her connection to the internet became very dicey.

Amina first commented on the story Syria’s Protests Canceled in which she corrected our writer on the facts about Syria. This comment lead to an apology and eventually, Amina writing on her own.

Amina and Sandra were planning a vacation to Rome this month, but Amina was worried about leaving Syria. Ms Bagaria told The New York Times “She did not want to risk being trapped outside Syria,. She wanted to be part of what is going on there. She wanted to keep protesting every day, meeting with people and organizing community meetings. She had a lot of contacts to make sure the protests would keep going and the opposition would keep growing and growing, to make people aware of what the regime was doing.”

Leah McElrath at Huffington Post adds:

[H]er abduction follows an arrest attempt by Syrian government security forces in April, an experience about which she blogged. After that experience and as her online visibility increased, Amina removed her photo from her blog and went into hiding in an attempt to protect her safety.

Prior to her abduction, I corresponded by email with Amina. She wrote a “cleaned up” version of the blog post about the arrest attempt and gave me her permission to publish it on Huffington Post under the title “Another Day in Damascus.”

Please click over and read Amina’s post published by Leah.

To track information regarding Amina on Twitter, follow the hashtag #FreeAmina.