Dumayr: Basic services covered by ‘modest’ community initiatives

PARIS — When it comes to maintaining public services, residents of Dumayr, a city 45 kilometers northeast of the Syrian capital, are on their own. For around a year, the city has seen community initiatives aimed at collecting donations to pay to maintain and repair water pumps and light public streets. 

Dumayr’s dilemma is shared by other cities and towns the Assad regime regained control of in 2018 under a series of Russian-sponsored settlement agreements with opposition forces. Despite returning to state control, these population centers still struggle with a lack of basic infrastructure and services the state is incapable of providing.

The Local Community Committee in Dumayr—also known as the Local Development Committee—is the body responsible for collecting donations and overseeing service projects. In mid-May, it worked to provide transportation for public high school students from Dumayr to test centers in Douma, a city 29 kilometers away. 

Such community initiatives are widespread in Syria’s southern Daraa province, another settlement area where the central government cannot provide a range of basic services entrusted to it. 

In April 2018, Damascus regained control of Dumayr in an agreement that included the departure of local opposition forces and their families, along with all those rejecting the settlement, for northwestern Syria. 

Six years later, Dumayr—like other settlement areas—suffers from poor basic services. This “drove the local community to rely more on itself to maintain and operate some of these services, according to the available capabilities,” a journalist who works for a local newspaper in the city told Syria Direct on condition of anonymity for security reasons. 

In late 2023, the regime-affiliated Dumayr City Council posted on its official Facebook page, calling for “all actors and citizens to cooperate and support” the local committee “to implement the rest of the projects” as “this work will help improve the drinking water reality significantly and effectively.” 

Community or government committee?

At the start of 2024, Dumayr’s city council included the formation of the local committee in a list of projects and works it carried out in 2023. 

The council has repeatedly posted calls on its Facebook page for residents to attend the committee’s events, which are organized in the city council hall under the auspices of the council and the local division of the ruling Arab Socialist Baath Party. 

The committee, which began working in June 2023, is made up of “notables from Dumayr, people of good character who are known and accepted by the local community,” one of its members told Syria Direct on condition of anonymity for security reasons. 

The member denied the committee is “formally” affiliated with the city council. Rather, the relationship is limited to “organizing work in the service sector, which helps improve citizens’ lives, and setting priorities,” he said. 

“Such committees have become necessary after the war, especially in light of the shortage of government resources,” the member added. “The projects carried out through the committee are implemented quickly compared to government institutions, which suffer from red tape and functional hierarchy.”

However, the journalist from Dumayr said the body is “completely subordinate to the city council—it does not carry out activities without the will of the municipality.” Some services the committee has managed to provide over the past year were implemented “through personal relationships and acquaintances with the government,” he added. 

“For example, an electricity transformer was provided through personal relationships with Ziyad Khaled, the head of the [General] Union of Peasants [GUP] in Damascus and its countryside, and a member of the Reef Dimashq Provincial Council,” the journalist said.

Residents’ view of the committee

Dumayr’s community committee has worked on several critical projects, such as working to operate a rationing-exempt electricity line to serve the Abu Qaws wells feeding the city’s water network and repairing a number of water pumps, the committee member said. It has also equipped a public toilet in the city center, maintained some main roads and installed solar-powered street lights on some. 

The amount of money collected for these projects was around 66 million Syrian pounds ($4,490 according to the black market exchange rate of SYP 14,700 to the dollar), he said. 

The city council continuously calls on residents “to work with the civil committee and support it in order to implement new projects or complete existing ones, such as the project to light the remaining streets with solar energy,” but “the local response remains weak,” the journalist in Dumayr said. 

The committee has held several meetings to gather donations “and invited people, but many times they were not well attended,” he added. In addition, “the committee organized visits to merchants and shop owners in the city to urge them to contribute, but the initiatives were modest.” 

In response to the weak response, the committee posted a message to Facebook in March in which it summarized some of its works “despite the simple capabilities.” It also expressed its dissatisfaction with the “significant absence of the city’s people” from a donation meeting it held in February and the “disinterest of some in the committee’s work.” 

Residents’ reluctance to donate is due to “the deteriorating economic situation of most of the city’s residents, as well as a lack of trust in the committee and the municipal council among some,” the journalist said. More than 90 percent of the country lives below the poverty line and more than 12 million Syrians are food insecure, according to the United Nations.

The average monthly cost of living for a Syrian family of five is more than SYP 13 million ($884), according to the Kassioun newspaper’s economic index, which is published by the Syrian People’s Will Party led by former Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Qadri Jamil. The minimum income needed to get by is around SYP 8.1 million ($551), while the minimum wage stands at around SYP 278,000 ($19).

Despite the low support for service projects in the Dumayr, the committee member believes “the response is acceptable, since it is the first experience in this regard in the area.” He hopes for “an improvement in the amount of donations to the committee, and [for] the concept of community cooperation and its role in building the country to spread, because it affects citizens and their living situation.” 

“We have new initiatives and several projects we are working on with the local community that will help improve the level of services after the long years of war the city went through, and the siege Syria suffers from,” he added. 

The main projects the committee is working on are “delivering drinking water to all the city’s neighborhoods and reducing dependence on private, costly tanked-in water,” he said. This “requires drilling new wells, operating them with solar power units and maintaining the pumps and network, so we are calling on the local community to support this project.”

This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.