News

The Damascus governorate last week issued a decision to delay issuing the final zoning plan for the Yarmouk Palestinian district in Damascus, which was largely destroyed in recent years as various factions battled for control of it. The delay came after objections to the plan from local residents themselves, as well as from Palestinian political forces in Syria and abroad.

The Syrian government agreed to grant Russia eight hectares of land, as well as the same amount of coastal waters, in the Lattakia province, officially to establish healthcare facilities affiliated with the Russian Aerospace Forces.

In June 2020, a Hezbollah commander informed residents of a handful of Syrian and Lebanese towns along the border between the two countries that this year’s harvest would be their last before their lands were confiscated.

Nearly a decade into Syria’s war, returning home remains dangerous for refugees: there is the risk of arrest, disappearance and ongoing conflict.

The Lattakia Provincial Council sent a recommendation in July to the Ministry of Local Administration and Environment to cancel expropriations along most of the coastal strip, given that none of the planned projects have been implemented since the properties were seized 45 years ago. However, it is unlikely that the ministry will heed the recommendation or reverse the expropriations.

Farmers in northern Hama are being restricted from accessing their farmlands in formerly opposition-held territory which was seized by regime forces in a military campaign early this year.

Construction work to significantly expand the Sayyida Zeinab shrine south of Damascus is nearly complete. The area of the shrine — a site of major religious importance to Shia Muslims, particularly from Iran —  has been doubled to three hectares.

A popular backlash has pushed the Kurdish-led administration of northeast Syria to repeal a law regulating the management of properties owned by "absentees" just one week after authorities issued the text. Officials said they halted the implementation of the law following "misunderstandings and different interpretations of its articles."

In recent weeks, as the date for the release of Aleppo’s new zoning plan approaches, the city’s council has stepped up monitoring in the destroyed eastern neighbourhoods. Municipal police are cracking down on construction sites and property owners who are trying to restore their buildings without permits.

The Syrian government is violating personal property rights in the town of Abbadeh, in the East Ghouta suburbs of Damascus, despite the fact that the town has been under government control since 2013 and is virtually empty of inhabitants.

The desertous Asfar region of eastern Suweida governorate has changed hands numerous times over the course of the war, controlled at various points by the Islamic State, the opposition, and the Syrian government. People displaced by the fighting are still unable to return, despite active military operations having ended there in late 2017.

The end of June 2020 saw the Ministry of Finance cancel precautionary seizures of properties belonging to 617 former armed and civilian opposition leaders in Daraa, including Ahmad Al-Odeh, now commander of the Russian-backed 8th Brigade of the Syrian Army’s 5th Corps.

Five people, including three Lattakia City Council members, died when an unlicensed four-storey building collapsed in the informal Al-Ghurraf neighbourhood of Lattakia’s Al-Ramal Al-Janoubi district after city authorities moved to demolish the structure on June 24.

The Damascus governorate has released a new zoning plan, No. 105, for Qaboun, a formerly embattled and now heavily damaged residential district just north of the capital.

The Damascus municipality recently announced that 50 additional hectares of land would be deducted from Harasta, a city just northeast of Damascus, and annexed to the new organisational plan of Qaboun, an adjacent suburb of Damascus, in accordance with the controversial Law 10.