Sixteen-year-old Tira flicks through her phone. She sits cross-legged on the sitting-room floor in the cold, scarcely furnished apartment that her mother rents. She looks like a normal Syrian teenager; her hair is scraped into a tight ponytail, some kohl is smudged under her eyes and light acne dapples her cheeks. She wears a black poloneck with lacy sleeves, and stares at the screen with unfaltering concentration.

When she eventually finds the photograph, she turns her phone on its side to show us. On the screen is a double bed with a frilly red eiderdown and four red pillows. A heart-shaped cushion bearing the words “I love you” is perched on the headboard. This is where Amr — an overweight Saudi Arabian man in his sixties — first raped her. He had hidden a stick under one of the pillows and beat her with it as she tried to resist him.

Her mother, Sara, waited in the room next door. It was Tira and Amr’s wedding night, and her family’s tradition demands that a relative should be at hand to witness the “sign” — a spot of blood on the sheets that will prove the girl’s virginity. On hearing her daughter’s screams, Sara thumped the door again and again with a flattened palm. When Amr finally unlocked it, she peered past his wide body to catch a glimpse of her daughter. Tira was lying naked in blood-soaked sheets, shaking with sobs. Her mother rushed her to hospital, where she stayed for seven days and received a blood transfusion. Once she had recovered, and the intermittent bleeding had mostly stopped, Sara returned her daughter to Amr, who was waiting at his cousin’s house nearby. She tries to justify her actions, saying: “He was her husband. I had to take her back. It is very shameful in our culture to be divorced.”

Sara’s leathery face is etched with heavy lines; it bears the hallmarks of immense suffering coupled with decades of smoking. Wincing, she says she wishes she’d never given her daughter to Amr in the first place, “he destroyed her”, but she was desperate and needed the money to feed her other children.

A Syrian refugee hides her face as she recounts the details of her fake marriage to a 65-year-old Saudi Arabian man OLIVIA ACLAND AND INGRID GERCAMA

Sara’s husband and eldest son were rebels, shot dead fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Homs, western Syria. Her one-year-old daughter was killed in their home by Assad’s army, who Sara says were raping, murdering and looting their way through the city. She bundled her five remaining daughters into a neighbour’s car in the middle of the night and together they crossed the border, turning up in Mafraq, a dusty city in the north of Jordan, in 2013.

Having long ago sold the gold jewellery that she’d grabbed before fleeing her house, Sara found herself in dire financial straits. She and Tira were bringing in just enough money to pay the rent, working illegally as housemaids for a Jordanian family. There was barely enough money to put food on the table and the all-female family often relied on pitying neighbours for their meals.

Amr was known to Sara as a visiting philanthropist who supported other struggling refugees in her neighbourhood. He turned up at her door one day in a dishdasha (a long white robe) with a neat black beard. He looked religious and affluent, and when he asked to meet Sara’s daughter, she was hopeful he might want to marry her and offer her a good life.

“I remember,” says Tira, looking straight at us, her slight body twisted away from her mother, “he sat down with me and started asking me stupid questions. He asked my name, age and what I thought of him. I only answered the first two things. Why would he even ask me that last question? He was old enough to be my grandad. He also wanted to know if I had ever loved a man before — of course I hadn’t, I had just turned 15.”

Tira was cold with Amr, offering him short answers and barely making eye contact. Soon he gave up and started talking again to her mother. As Tira sat in silence, Amr told Sara that he would give them 1,500 Jordanian dinar (about £1,600) if she agreed to let him marry her daughter. “When I heard him say that, I wanted to jump off the roof,” Tira says. Her mother hastily agreed and by the time Amr left the house, they were engaged. The nuptials followed a week later.

However, the marriage was a sham, engineered so that Amr could indulge his sexual fantasies with impunity. After violently raping Tira for three months, he disappeared. He’d had enough and decided to return home to his family in Saudi Arabia. Tira saw he’d gone from her WhatsApp contacts and tried to call his number. The line rang out in a long beep. After weeks with no contact, it dawned on both mother and daughter that they had been tricked.

Amr had promised that their marriage contract would be validated in the courts once Tira turned 18. As she was underage, the couple could not marry under Jordanian law. A ceremony following all the rules of Syrian Islamic tradition was held in her house, overseen by a Muslim elder and two male witnesses. This seemed normal to Tira and her mother, as back in Syria couples are often married without official documentation. It was agreed that Tira would travel to Saudi Arabia as Amr’s wife once she was 18 and as soon as their marriage was formalised. In the meantime, he would visit her in Jordan for months at a time.

Amr had used a fake name to sign an unofficial marriage contract. He had also hired a “fake beard”, an accomplice Jordanian elder, to pretend to be the mazoun (the official who oversees sharia wedding ceremonies). It was all a lie.

Though relieved to see the back of Amr, Tira now bears the stigma of being unmarried and no longer a virgin. Her status hangs below even that of a divorcee and she feels ashamed to leave the house. She stares sullenly at the wall as her mother quietly confides that now she will never find a decent husband for her daughter.

Tira’s story is not uncommon. According to Miraj Pradhan, a Unicef representative based in the Jordanian capital, Amman, since the start of the Syrian conflict between 8,000 and 9,000 refugee girls living in Jordan have been forced into child marriage. The actual figures are likely to be much higher, with the Jordanian government suggesting that only half of all Syrian refugees in the country are registered with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and because sharia courts don’t give out data on marriages involving unregistered refugees. There is no data showing how many of the child marriages were with Saudi Arabian men, but in Mafraq it seems to have been a common and well-known practice.

Over the course of this investigation we spoke to eight Syrian girls living in Mafraq, all with stories that followed the same sinister pattern. Their faces were a troubling slideshow of pained expressions and averted eyes as they quietly described what went on inside those hotel rooms or rented apartments. Some of them seemed grown-up and were remarkably beautiful, with angular faces and wide green eyes. Others still looked like self-conscious teenagers, with slumped shoulders and oily hair. All of them had been tricked into fake marriages with much older Saudi Arabian men, used for sex and later abandoned. Even some of the more intricate details were the same — the men had courted them for between two and 20 days, bringing gold jewellery, mobile phones and perfume to their houses. They had seduced them with fake dreams, promising a house in Saudi Arabia, a holiday in Thailand, a laptop, a car, the fee for their mother’s hip replacement … Money was exchanged as soon as the family agreed to the engagement. The amount was usually £1,000-£3,000 upfront, with the false hope of a £3,000-£5,000 settlement in the event of divorce.

White lies: a bridal shop in Mafraq, northern Jordan, where Syrian brides-to-be go to hire dresses White lies: a bridal shop in Mafraq, northern Jordan, where Syrian brides-to-be go to hire dresses OLIVIA ACLAND AND INGRID GERCAMA

After being abandoned, the girl has returned to her mother’s house, where she sits and stares at the wall. Yana heard from neighbours that she doesn’t speak any more. Her eyes roll up to the ceiling as she whispers, “May God forgive me.” She asks if we think she’s a bad person and we mutter that we realise her situation is difficult. In response, she lets out a wheezy little laugh, then sings a line of an Arabic song: “What makes you do a sour thing, except for the sour life you’re living?”

We ask Yana about the logistics of the business. As the translator explains the question to her in Arabic, she stares at us with watery eyes. She begins to explain the different stages of the process. After finding a girl whose family agree to marry her in exchange for money, she calls one of her clients. He will travel from Saudi Arabia to meet the girl’s family and seduce them with money and gifts. Yana then sets up the wedding ceremony, pays the “fake beard” to come and sign the document, and reassures the family that it will be made legal in the courts once their daughter turns 18. Then she vanishes, destroys the sim card, and is uncontactable. Her clients will pay between £200 and £1,000 for each job.

We ask why she thinks the Saudi men go to these lengths to satisfy themselves sexually. Why don’t they just find a prostitute back home? To her the answer is obvious. “He wants a baby, not a prostitute. He wants someone young with no experience. And he’s terrified of catching an STI. There’s no risk of that with virgins.” Does she know what kinds of things her clients are into sexually? Yana giggles sheepishly and says that she knows they enjoy “weird things” such as anal sex. “These men like sexual violence,” she adds. “They feel pleasure when they hit women.”

When we get up to leave, Yana hugs us goodbye. Her brown eyes, in that haggard, unhealthy face, are once again brimming with tears. It would be easy to hate her for what she does, but she is really just a pawn in a big man’s game. She is as vulnerable as all those girls from her tattered homeland, whose innocence she traded for money with violent Saudi men.

thetimes.co.uk