Displaced Syrian women grapple with loss of real estate ownership

AFRIN — Amira al-Tawil has experienced the bitter loss of her home and property twice. The first time was in early 2012, when she fled her Damascus neighborhood for Idlib with her family after the Syrian regime detained multiple relatives. The second came seven years later, when regime bombardment displaced her from the southern Idlib countryside in 2019. Still displaced, today she lives in a camp in northern Idlib.  

When al-Tawil first came to opposition-held northwestern Syria with her husband and children in 2012, there was no news of what happened to the home they left behind in the Syrian capital’s al-Zahra neighborhood. Later, she heard only that “the regime sealed it with red wax,” she told Syria Direct. Sealing a property in this way indicates it cannot be sold or occupied without state approval. 

In southern Idlib, al-Tawil built a new house, after selling her gold jewelry and receiving support from relatives. But the same year, regime warplanes bombed it, killing her husband. 

With what “strength and community support” she still had, al-Tawil “rebuilt a small part of the destroyed house, and lived there with my five children until we were displaced from the countryside” in 2019, al-Tawil said. Newly adrift, they took shelter in one of the many camps scattered across Syria’s northwest, where half the population is displaced. 

Property loss ranks among the most prominent repercussions of the war in Syria that began in the wake of the spring 2011 revolution. With around 13.8 million people displaced within the country and outside its borders, and 40 percent of Syria’s infrastructure damaged by conflict, many Syrians have lost their real estate and the right to sell or make use of it. 

Women are among those those most impacted by the loss of real estate ownership, due to the social roles many take on in caring for families and managing homes. They also face additional obstacles to regaining their rights, especially when property is registered in the names of husbands or fathers forcibly disappeared or killed during the war. 

“My Property is My Right,” a study conducted this year by the research division of Syrian organization Women Now for Development—in collaboration with displaced women in northwestern Syria—noted that new laws approved by Damascus have also made it harder for women to access their properties or transfer properties into their names. Security concerns and the fear of arrest prevent women from returning to regime areas to claim their rights, while new legislation increases the social and community legacies of the difficulties women face. 

Lost documents

The final battle for Aleppo—a military operation launched by the Syrian regime, supported by Russia, against armed opposition factions in Aleppo city—ended in late 2016 with the largest forced displacement of the war. In all, around 400,000 people were displaced.

Salma al-Saleh (a pseudonym) was one of them. That year, she was displaced from Aleppo city to Azaz, a city in the northern Aleppo countryside. In the process, she lost the ownership documents for her house—which was registered in the name of her husband, who was killed in the city. 

Al-Saleh later tried to sell their home in absentia, working with a lawyer living in regime territory who said he could do so, because of his proximity to the authorities, for $2,000. She borrowed the money from a relative in Germany, but found she had been cheated. “The sale was not done as promised,” she said, though the lawyer “asked for pictures of me,” which she supposed was done with the intent to blackmail her later. 

Read more: Blackmail and scams: Digital violence stalks women in northwestern Syria

Relatives of Syria’s dead, missing and forcibly disappeared face additional challenges to protect and manage their real estate properties due to the loss of official documents and complex procedures required by the regime. 

Complicating matters further, Damascus does not recognize the presence of many of the missing in its prisons—or their deaths. This leaves surviving relatives unable to obtain a death certificate allowing the heirs to manage property, and makes it harder for relatives to apply for power of attorney for a missing person, which Damascus tied to obtaining “security approval” in September 2021. 

Currently, al-Saleh does not dare go to Aleppo city herself to try to find a solution to her property issue in regime institutions, “for fear of arrest,” she said. She no longer has the trust or financial means to try again with a different lawyer. 

“Displaced Syrian women who try to claim their property face double challenges,” researcher Bayan al-Maleh of the Women Now’s Women’s Research Division, who prepared the research study, told Syria Direct. Just nine percent of the 93 women from nine provinces who participated in the study were working to claim their properties or those of relatives. Those who did “risked going to regime-controlled areas, or appointed female relatives in those areas instead of men out of the fear of arrest or conscription,” she explained. 

The struggle for rights

Many women who boarded displacement buses from opposition areas to northwestern Syria over the past 13 years were not openly active in anti-regime activities. Still, “the regime views every displaced person as an opponent and a terrorist,” Ibrahim Houmad, a member of the Free Syrian Lawyers Association’s Aleppo branch, told Syria Direct.

Therefore, it “deals with their rights in a security manner, including preventing them from disposing of their real estate properties, and sometimes confiscating or using them without the rights holder’s consent,” the lawyer added. 

Women outside Syria can hire a lawyer or appoint a person within regime areas to represent them in managing their properties through embassies abroad, “provided the owner is not under a security restriction,” Houmad said. But women in opposition areas cannot do so, and must go to regime areas first to conduct their transactions or appoint a proxy. 

This task is complicated by “the loss of official documents, because they must request a real estate record first, to prove ownership, then go through the rest of the procedures,” Houmad added. 

For its part, the regime has issued several laws that violate citizens’ real estate rights. These include the Planning and Urban Development Law No. 23 of 2015, which allows administrative units to take over private property for public projects. Law No. 10 of 2018, meanwhile, entitles the state to take control of the property of displaced people, refugees and anyone unable to confirm registration in the real estate registry within a specified period. 

Damascus has also raised real estate sale taxes, through Law No. 15 of 2021, to 15 percent of the value of inherited properties. in addition to requiring security approvals as a condition of sale, and other “deceptive methods by which it justified to itself its right to strip owners’ rights,” Houman said. 

Given all the obstacles women face, many have been forced to “deal with brokers close to the ruling authority, who charge unreasonable fees, sometimes reaching the point of taking a share of the property, half its value or a quarter of it, depending on the owner’s legal status,” the lawyer said. 

In 2015, al-Tawil tried to remove the red wax seal from her house in Damascus to sell it. The lawyer asked for $1,500 to remove the restriction, on top of half the value of the house when it sold. 

Women need many resources to claim or restore their properties, which requires “a process of societal change,” al-Maleh, of Women Now, said. “Knowledge-based legal resources are foremost, from training on mechanisms to claim property and beyond to financial support and advocacy campaigns,” which she focused on in the study. 

Psychological effects

After she fled southern Idlib in 2019, al-Tawil moved around with her children, first living at a camp for widows in the Idlib countryside, then in an unfinished house in the Dana area of northern Idlib, before settling in the Turkish Red Crescent Camp in Kafr Karmin where they now live. 

Psychological difficulties she experienced, “affected my relationship with my children and acquaintances,” she said. Moving from place to place, she lost “community support,” as “people were scattered in camps and different parts of northern Syria.” 

The Women Now study indicated that all 93 women participating suffer from psychological effects such as  “fear, anxiety, insecurity, a lack of belonging” and “loss of social status,” alongside social stigma related to displacement. These impacts not only affect their health, but also that of their children. 

The conditions of displacement increase this psychological toll. Maram al-Abdullah, 57, knows this well. In 2019, she fled the bombing of her south Idlib village of Maarat Harma for the Deir Hassan camps in the northern Idlib countryside. After the regime captured her hometown in 2020, her hopes of returning home faded, she told Syria Direct. 

“The memories of my previous house do not leave me. It was spacious, with three rooms and a sitting room. The kitchen was filled with jars of jam, pickles and cheeses I made myself,” al-Abdullah recalled. In the courtyard, “we had a big walnut tree, lemon and orange trees I planted with my own hands, and a bread tannour,” she added. 

“The idea of living in a place roofed with a piece of fabric is deadly—every time I look at it, I remember my house I was forcibly displaced from,” al-Abdullah said. She is constantly on edge, in a state of “worry and fear, associated with loss and insecurity,” she said. “I often find myself on alert, as though I am waiting for something bad to happen at any moment.” 

Al-Abdullah cannot return to her home—much less sell or rent it—because it lies in “a military zone, on the line of contact between regime forces and the opposition,” she said. Unable to improve her living conditions or find decent housing, she feels “the hope for a better future fading away, little by little.” 

According to figures from the Syrian Response Coordination Group, there are 1,904 camps housing around two million people in northwestern Syria. Women, like al-Abdullah and al-Tawil, make up 26 percent of camp residents. 

Psychologist Rajaa al-Ahmad, who monitored the psychological state of women participating in the Women Now study, observed “many reactions and emotions such as sadness, self-dissatisfaction and severe depression due to the loss of their properties.” Only “a small percentage had overcome the shock and adapted to their current reality,” she said. 

Al-Ahmad stressed the importance of psychological support, emotional release and education about how to deal with psychological pressure, feelings and emotions of all kinds, based on what she perceived in her conversations with displaced women. 

Since reclaiming their rights or returning to their properties is not possible in the foreseeable future, many women have sought ways to adapt to their current reality: maintaining close-knit families, continuing their education or working. They have also worked to strengthen community cohesion and support other women, according to the Women Now study.

Many women who have lost their properties have tried to make their living spaces in the northwest resemble their old homes, keeping items and belongings they brought with them. They keep old keys as a message emphasizing their belief that they are the rightful owners, and that a right must return to its owners.

Alongside the study, Women Now set up advisory groups to provide a space for women to share their experiences and exchange knowledge. The organization also tried to raise women’s legal and technical awareness of property ownership documents and ways to preserve and protect them, al-Maleh said. 

“Words cannot express the feeling of being uprooted from a home I lived in for 20 years,” al-Tawil said. Her situation has gained sympathy from her local community, individuals and organizations alike. But despite advocacy efforts and their positive impact on her, nothing can ease her longing for her home in Damascus but return.

This report was produced in collaboration with Women Now for Development as part of Syria Direct’s Sawtna Training Program for women journalists across areas of control in Syria. It was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.