Would you rather be a sex slave of Syria's Assad regime or of the Islamic State?

Jounieh is a city north of Beirut that sits comfortably on the Mediterranean. It's the kind of place one goes to get a short respite from the cacophony of the big city.

But Jounieh is also where authorities broke up Lebanon’s largest sex trafficking ring. The operation was successful insofar as 75 women - overwhelmingly Syrian - were freed from their dungeons. 

The women had been enslaved, beaten and tortured. Their doors were only ever unlocked when a "customer" arrived.

During their captivity, "most of the Syrian nationals had been subjected to beating and psychological and physical torture" by their captors, said the Lebanese security forces.

There has been an influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon’s sex trafficking racket, as gangsters prey on the desperate.

Many are literally forced into this at the barrel of a gun.

Sources such as the US State Department say that for as long as the Syrian war continues, vulnerable refugee women and minors from Syria are likely to be at serious risk.

As with many of Lebanon’s woes, the trail soon led to Damascus, when an ex-Assad regime official was accused of allegedly running the Jounieh sex ring. His name was Emad al-Rijawi, a major and former Syrian intelligence interrogator.

According to the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper, al-Akhbar, he was known as “the torturer” for the unspeakable acts of barbarism he would afflict on captive women to make sure they “did their job”. 

This is yet another instance which allows for a viable comparison between the brutalities of the Assad regime and IS militants.

There is a repository of damning evidence to show that Assad’s army, security forces and hired hooligans have engaged in all sorts of depraved acts of sexual violence against women, men and children.

Human Rights Watch has documented women who were victims of gang rape and sexual torture - such as electric shocks on their genitalia - by Assad security forces.

“A guard tied my hands behind my back. He grabbed my breast again and I pushed him. Then he grabbed me by the chest and threw me against the wall. I fell and he started beating me with a stick,” recalls one woman made it out of Assad’s dungeons alive.

The sordid crimes of sexual enslavement and rape are not only codes of conduct among Assad’s lackeys, but the rank and file of IS militants are this way inclined too.

Remember the Yazidi women who were spirited away by IS during its onslaught in Iraq, and kept as spoils of war.

“He asked me to take my clothes off. He put me in a room with the guards. Then they proceeded to commit their crime until I fainted,” one Yazidi woman told the Independent.

Reducing the Syrian conflict to a question of "Assad or IS" glosses over its complexity in search of a quick solution, regardless of the ramifications.

It is a sinister discourse which seeks to mute the suffering of ordinary Syrians at the hands Assad, because by implication he’s presented as the better option.

Surely we could not think of ourselves as morally honest human beings while simultaneously telling the Syrian people they are stuck with totalitarianism, they just have to choose whether they want it by the Baath party or the theocrats of IS.

Assad’s regime is guilty of myriad crimes against the Syrian people. We must support the people of Syria by taking pushing for a representative and democratic government, not narrowing the parameters of their political future with the endorsements of their tormentors. 

- Matthew Ayton is a reporter, politics and history lecturer based in Beirut. He has previously reported from the occupied Palestinian territories. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: A Syrian sex trafficking victim smokes a cigarette at her safehouse at an undisclosed location in Lebanon on 13 April 2016, after she fled a brothel in Lebanon where she was being held captive (AFP).