A prominent Syrian American blogger, Amina Arraf, author of A Gay Girl in Damascus, was kidnapped yesterday in Damascus by several unidentified men carrying weapons as she walked to a meeting. Yesterday afternoon, Arraf's cousin posted this on her blog:

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.

In a follow up post, Amina's cousin writes that attempts to locate her have so far been unsuccessful:

Unfortunately, there are at least 18 different police formations in Syria as well as multiple different party militias and gangs. We do not know who took her so we do not know who to ask to get her back. It is possible that they are forcibly deporting her.

Meanwhile, Syria's ridiculous state TV says that "120 Police and Security Forces" were "martyred by armed gangs" in the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour yesterday, which the government will undoubtedly use as a pretext for more violence against the Syrian people. SANA's report has a pretty great typo, too:

SANA's reporter in Idleb said that security reinforcements were sent to the area where the ambush was set, adding that security forces and police are surrounding some houses in which the armed men are hiding and firing on soldiers and villains.

Or maybe it wasn't a typo.

[A Gay Girl in Damascus, SANA]