HLP

Some stories don’t fit into a news cycle. Housing, land and property rights in Syria are exactly that kind of tale, sprawling across legal texts, official sources, field reporting and institutional publications, and rarely brought together in one place, with the depth they deserve. That’s why we’re launching Green Tabu, Syria’s first HLP journal. Named […]

This paper concludes that reconstruction in Syria cannot be managed as an urban planning or investment matter separate from housing, property and return rights. With millions of Syrians still displaced or living abroad as refugees, a large portion of the housing stock damaged, and the cost of reconstructing residential buildings reaching levels beyond the state’s current capacity, any reconstruction process undertaken before rights are established and property disputes addressed risks producing a new wave of exclusion. The problem, therefore, lies in the possibility that urban planning and external financing may become mechanisms for redistributing property, reducing the rights of original residents, or making those affected bear the cost of reconstruction through shares and deductions. 

The Ministry of Endowments under Syria’s transitional government has begun reorganising the management of waqf (“endowment”) properties after many years in which these assets were subject to centralised administration and long-term investment and rental contracts. A waqf is, essentially, money or property dedicated to a religious, charitable, or social purpose. Its proceeds are removed from ordinary individual circulation and remain tied to the purpose specified by the founder of the waqf. According to the ministry, today’s reorganisation involves documenting endowment properties, recovering properties it considers lost or unlawfully occupied, and reassessing the rents charged on endowment real estate. The ministry presents these measures as part of an effort to regulate the endowments sector and collect the proceeds generated by its assets. However, a request by one ministry official for Ottoman archives from Turkey has raised legal and social concerns, particularly about the possible use of these records to trace certain properties and reconsider usufruct and rental agreements that have existed for many years.

More than 6 years after most Yazidis were displaced from the villages around Ras Al-Ayn, their homes and land remain registered in their names, yet they live far away and are unable to return to or make use of them. For many displaced people, return is no longer connected only to recovering a home or agricultural land, but also to regaining a sense of safety in a place associated in their memories with violence, fear and uprooting. Between property rights that remain legally recorded and realities on the ground imposed by armed factions, the return of Yazidis to their villages remains a fragile and deferred possibility. 

This paper approaches major real estate development projects as a test of how reconstruction is managed in Syria, rather than merely as investment or urban development projects. When land and property become a means of attracting finance and reactivating assets, protecting housing, land, and property rights becomes a necessary condition for preventing investment from turning into a tool for redistributing space and value outside a clear rights-based process.

Legislative Decree No. 66 of 2012 was issued as a tool for rezoning large areas of unlicensed and informal housing in Damascus. Over more than a decade, however, it has become one of Syria’s most sensitive property and housing issues. The problem is no longer confined to an urban plan or an administrative delay, but lies in a lengthy process that changed the very form of the right itself: from direct ownership of a property to zoning shares, from an existing home to a promise of alternative housing, and from property available for everyday use to a right requiring proof, valuation, allocation, financing and years of waiting. Decree No. 66 has thus become a test of how rights are produced within a reconstruction project before it is a test of the ability to construct buildings, roads and infrastructure. 

The property rights crisis in Suweida now unfolds through several channels, beginning with death registration and extending to Estate Inheritance Inventory Documents (EIIDs), powers of attorney, sales and ownership transfers. Since the July 2025 massacre, victims’ families have faced obstacles in registering deaths and amending family civil registration records, preventing heirs from obtaining the documents needed to deal with inherited property. Then, on 20 May 2026, the Ministry of Justice issued Decision No. 1475, freezing most judicial, property and notarisation transactions in the governorate. The ministry presented the decision as a measure to protect property rights, but its broad application closed the legal channels residents, expatriates and heirs need to manage their property. With no clear time limit for the freeze and no exceptions for urgent cases, ownership remains recorded in the Land Registry while the ability to sell property, transfer ownership or derive income from it is effectively suspended.

Some stories don’t fit into a news cycle. Housing, land and property rights in Syria are exactly that kind of tale, sprawling across legal texts, official sources, field reporting and institutional publications, and rarely brought together in one place, with the depth they deserve. That’s why we’re launching Green Tabu, Syria’s first HLP journal. Read its first issue here.

What does it mean to destroy not just a city, but the very conditions that make return possible? Spatial planner Marh Echtai examines the July 2025 assault on Suweida through the interlocking frameworks of urbicide, domicide, and ecocide, arguing that the violence visited upon the Druze community was not a security operation gone wrong, but a deliberate, layered strategy of spatial erasure.

On March 13, the Damascus Governorate held a meeting to present a reconstruction project for “the revival” of the areas east of the capital, including Jobar, Qaboun, and Bab Sharqi. Around 30 people attended the meeting, including members of neighbourhood committees, dignitaries from Qaboun and Jobar (but not from Bab Sharqi), as well as lawyers and engineers.

The local council in the city of Ayn Tarma in Rural Damascus has proposed a new revision to the master plan based on expanding the city’s boundaries and increasing urban density. This will be done by incorporating unzoned areas and allowing the construction of residential towers, with an increase in the number of permitted storeys, and permitting the construction of residential towers throughout the entire city and not only in the damaged areas.

Syria’s Transitional President, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, issued Decree No. 57 on March 8, forming a national committee to rehabilitate infrastructure in heavily damaged areas. The aim is to allow displaced people to return, as well as to close various displacement camps, amid growing criticism directed at the  government due to the deteriorating conditions in the camps and the decline in support from international organisations.

Returnees to the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp and the nearby Tadhamon neighbourhood south of Damascus face complex problems relating to their property ownership after discovering that their properties had been sold or seized under forged contracts or through security pressure during the years of their absence. Networks including brokers, owners of real estate agencies, and sometimes lawyers exploited the circumstances of some displaced people, and the loss of their personal and property documents, and defrauded them in order to strip them of their possessions.

The transitional government is preparing a new “Syrian National Code” for safety standards in the construction of housing, industrial facilities, and tourist establishments. The new project aims to establish a more comprehensive framework for safety standards in construction, including requirements for earthquake-resistant design, fire safety, and resilience to natural disasters, as well as ensuring the structural safety of buildings.

An increasing number of Syrians residing in Lebanon have returned in recent days alongside escalating Israeli bombardment across wide areas of Lebanon, including the southern suburbs of Beirut. Many of the returnees are going back to damaged homes that require renovation work, or buildings that have been completely destroyed and require rebuilding.

The Ministry of Local Administration and Environment has begun  surveying damage sustained by housing during the war in Syria, in cooperation with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme UN-Habitat. The survey aims to produce a unified official database on the scale of housing damage. The process began in Daraa Governorate in February 2026 and will later expand to include the remaining governorates.

Shia residents in the Homs governorate continue to suffer violations affecting their property and communities following the ouster of the Assad regime in December 2024. In a context where legal and institutional mechanisms to achieve justice remain unstable, those affected by housing and property violations face limited options: temporary or permanent displacement, or entering legal paths with uncertain outcomes.

The Ministry of Local Administration and Environment is working to amend the Financial Law of Administrative Units No. 37 of 2021 to review the matter of fees and taxes collected by administrative units, including those linked to real estate.

On January 28, the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs issued its Circular No. 57, which provides for the removal of seizure notices, bans on disposal, and restrictions of disposal placed on properties belonging to opposition figures issued during the Assad regime by the “Intelligence Branch”. The circular stated that the branch is not legally authorised to impose these restrictions. 

The issuance of Circular No. 135 by the Ministry of Finance on July 30, 2025 has affected the regulatory framework of Syria’s real estate market, as it redefined the basis for calculating real estate sales tax and linked the completion of property transfers to obtaining a “No Objection to Completing the Real Estate Transaction” document.