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. 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.

After the administration of Raqqa city was transferred to Syria’s transitional authorities in January, urban challenges that had accumulated over the past years became evident. Residents had been relying on themselves to repair their homes, while construction expanded onto agricultural land outside the zoning plan, and informal building was on the rise.

The text of the January 30 agreement between the Syrian transitional government and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) stipulates “guaranteeing the return of the displaced to their areas” but it does not specify any implementation mechanism, the timeframe, or the body authorised to oversee the return.

More than a year after the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, the city of Deir-ez-Zor continues to suffer from a structural housing crisis due to extensive wartime destruction, without any serious or clear steps by the transitional administration towards rebuilding the destroyed areas.

The city of Nashabiya, in the East Ghouta area of Rural Damascus, is facing an escalating housing crisis, amid the widespread destruction inflicted during years of siege and bombardment, and the absence of any broad plan for reconstruction following the fall of the Assad regime.

The Damascus Governorate, in cooperation with the German development agency (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit - GIZ) and the Jobar Board of Trustees, has inaugurated an HLP Support Unit dedicated to the residents of Jobar, one of the capital’s most heavily destroyed neighbourhoods. The centre is located in Abbasiyyin Square in central Damascus and was officially inaugurated on Monday.

Amid a wave of military confrontations and agreements between the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the transitional government forces in January, the areas under SDF control shrank considerably, now mostly confined to the predominantly Kurdish regions in north-eastern Syria. Waves of displacement followed, reshaping the demographic map of the region, after the city of Qamishli and the town of Kobani receiving tens of thousands of displaced people.

This article offers a detailed examination of the subsequent stage of compulsory enforcement, namely the procedures for selling the property at public auction, including the mechanisms of announcement, participation requirements, the conduct of bidding sessions, assignment decisions, and the resulting legal effects on ownership and the rights of creditors and debtors.