From his new home in Heerenveen, Omar Ayoub often thinks back to his old home in Syria. It is located near the old bazaar of the provincial town of Rastan. It has two floors, nine rooms and borders a garden with palm trees and cypresses.
“As a child I played in that garden with the children from the neighborhood,” says Ayoub, a 40-year-old Syrian who fled to the Netherlands in 2014. The house in Rastan belongs to his father, who inherited it from his grandfather. “I was born there, spent my entire childhood there and got married there. It’s a house full of memories.”
An intruder lives there since 2018. According to Ayoub, this is an officer from an Iranian-backed militia who fought for President Assad in the war. “We heard from our old neighbors that he stole our house,” he says. “It is a terrible thought that such a criminal is now in our living room, but there is nothing we can do about it.”
Meanwhile, Ayoub hears that many Dutch people believe that Syrians can return home after twelve years of war. “I wish they understood that that is not possible at all,” he says. “I was politically active and would be arrested immediately. Besides, we no longer have a house at all!”
Nearly 60 percent of the Dutch were in favor of the return of Syrian refugees in 2019, according to one opinion poll of the Red Cross. In Turkey, which hosts 3.6 million Syrians, that percentage was 82 percent, according to a 2022 local poll. In Turkey, Lebanon (1.5 million Syrian refugees) and Jordan (1.3 million), the hatred of refugees is taking violent forms and politicians promise mass evictions.
Read also: Less and less support for Syrian refugees in the region
Returned refugees can become arrested and torturedhuman rights organizations warn. In addition, 90 percent of the Syrian population lives below the poverty line and many homes of Syrian refugees have been destroyed or, like Ayoub’s, taken over by the regime. Return is therefore not only dangerous, but often also impossible.
“The expropriation of Syrian refugees is systematic,” says Ali Aljasem, a Syrian researcher in conflict studies at Utrecht University. Precise figures on the scale of the theft are not available, but Aljasem says expropriation of civilian property is one of the main sources of income for Assad’s security services. “They’re stripping the land.”
Forgery tactics
Aljasem’s own house has also been taken, he says. “A shabih [lid van pro-Assad milities en knokploegen] came by in 2017 and learned that my family was active in the opposition. He thought: then they are terrorists, so let me live there. When we objected, he said we should come back. He knows that this is dangerous for us.”
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Photo Muhammed Said/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
To give the robbery the appearance of legitimacy, the regime invokes a series of laws. For example, Decree 63 of the 2012 anti-terrorism law allows the regime to confiscate assets of ‘terrorists’ and freeze their bank accounts. Law number 10 followed in 2018, which stipulates that when the government designates a piece of land for development, the owners of all buildings in that area must provide their title deeds within one month. If they don’t, the regime can expropriate them.
This is the work of an organized mafia
The problem is that many Syrians have lost such documents. In addition, it is made difficult for Syrians who have left the country to arrange their paperwork remotely and many of them do not dare to return.
Last month reported The Guardian about another tactic in the Syrian expropriation business: the falsification of official documents. The British newspaper collaborated with the Syrian journalist collective SIRAJ and the Syrian NGO The Day Afterwho inspected forged documents and spoke to victims.
The forgery tactic works as follows. You find a house or piece of land, preferably belonging to a Syrian refugee. Then you forge his or her ID and property documents and draw up a fake power of attorney. With those documents you can sell the assets on behalf of the absent owner. Of course the notary, judge and other authorities have to turn a blind eye, but if you pay them – or are from the secret service – that is quickly arranged.
“This way you can ‘legally’ resell real estate,” says Abdul Nasser Hoshan, a former lawyer from Syria who now lives in Turkey and who also researched the subject. “A buyer wants everything to appear in order. That is more difficult with a house that has been confiscated.”
Hoshan worked in military courts in Syria and says he has the necessary contacts who have access to the forged documents. With their help, he says he documented 125 cases of houses in Damascus stolen in this way in the first half of 2022. NRC could see a sample of the documents.
“This is the work of an organized mafia,” says Hoshan. “Previously, expropriations were more chaotic, but now we really see a network that cooperates with the security services and the Fourth Division [een elitekorps van het Syrische leger aangevoerd door Maher al-Assad, de broer van de president].”
Militias and mafia bosses
It shows how the Syrian state functions after twelve years of war, says Ali Aljasem. “Assad’s regime is not a ‘government’ with institutions in the Dutch sense of the word. It is an entanglement of security services, militias, mafia bosses and local notables, headed by Assad. To broaden his power base and reward his allies in war, Assad is giving them free rein to squeeze the population.”
Yet the expropriations are not just about greed and money. It is also a form of population policy, Aljasem emphasises. According to him, the regime specifically selects former opposition neighborhoods for ‘redevelopment’ and allocates expropriated land and homes to loyalists. “It is a way to permanently change the composition of Syria,” says Aljasem. “Assad does not want his opponents to return at all.”
Read also: Amnesty International: Syrian refugees are at risk if they return
If they do, they can count on punishment. According to Aljasem, those who escape arrest are extorted and humiliated. “If your house is stolen, you have to go to the secret service. Who knows, you might get it back, but only if you put down mountains of cash. They will also tell you that you are a coward who has left his country. They take away your dignity – exactly what started the uprising against Assad in 2011.”
Omar Ayoub therefore does not want to go back under any circumstances as long as Assad is in power. He built a new life in Heerenveen with his wife and four children and learned Dutch by doing an internship among the cows on a farm. Now he works as a truck driver and is thinking about starting his own business. In 2019, he and his family received a Dutch passport. “Of course I want to show my children our house in Rastan,” he says. “But the Netherlands is also our home.”
His 72-year-old father thinks otherwise, Ayoub sighs. “He lives in Istanbul and tells me every day on the phone that he wants to go back. His last wish is that he can die in his old house. But as long as that intruder is there, that is impossible.”
A version of this article also appeared in the May 4, 2023 issue.