Aleppo City Demolishes Quake-Damaged Building Without Offering Alternative Housing

A work crew of the Aleppo City Council demolished in February a dilapidated building in an informal settlement within the Ferdous neighbourhood in the eastern part of the city. It was demolished due to the building’s dangerous condition and the potential for it to collapse at any moment, following significant damage it sustained during the earthquake on February 6, 2023.

The Public Safety Committee of the City Council, in a report issued towards the end of 2023 classified the building as cracked and in need of foundation repairs, but did not recommend evacuating the residents. The committee informed the residents of the building’s danger, but did not advise them to evacuate, according to a correspondent for The Syria Report in the area. In early February 2024, several residents approached the City Council after they visually observed a significant increase in cracks and fissures, particularly in the columns. Subsequently, the Public Safety Committee inspected the building again and decided to evacuate it immediately after detecting cracks in the building’s structure and a subsidence in one of its main columns.

The building, unlicensed, was constructed on a private plot of land within an unzoned area classified for agricultural use where construction is prohibited. Consequently, the entire property is not registered in the Land Record. The land ownership document is a court judgement, and the apartment ownership documents are notarised sales contracts.

The building, consisting of six floors and constructed before the year 2000, designated the ground floor for commercial shops, and five residential floors housing a total of 15 apartments, of which only five were inhabited. Prior to evacuation, these five apartments were occupied by three displaced families renting, and two families owning their apartments. The remaining apartments, most in need of rehabilitation and lacking doors and windows, were unoccupied, with their owners forcibly displaced to opposition areas in northwest Syria.

A correspondent for The Syria Report stated that the city council forced the residents to evacuate the building within a few hours following the issuance of the second public safety committee report in February 2024. The report had warned the residents of the necessity to leave due to the danger of remaining in the building and the need for its demolition. However, the residents resisted leaving the building and refused to evacuate before receiving a promise from the city council to secure alternative housing for them or to include their names on the lists issued by the Aleppo governorate for those eligible for support from the National Fund for Earthquake Victims, established by Legislative Decree No. 7 of 2023.

To resolve the standoff, the council enlisted a patrol from the law enforcement forces to evacuate the residents. After being evicted, the residents were forced to displace and search for affordable housing for rent in the informal Karm Homad neighbourhood nearby. Within hours after the evacuation, a city council workshop demolished the building using heavy machinery, including bulldozers and trucks, after the neighbouring buildings were evacuated as a precaution. The head of the council, Maad Madlaji, oversaw the evacuation and demolition operations. As with the majority of buildings that were demolished after the earthquake, the rubble from the Ferdous building was transported to the rubble recycling station in Sheikh Said.

It remains unclear why the city council did not inform those residents about the soon-to-be-added “Category C” of those eligible for support from the National Fund for Earthquake Victims. This category includes owners of properties that were demolished after the earthquake, or will be demolished, through decisions from the public safety committees due to the structural unsafety of these properties and the impossibility of reinforcing them. “Category C” is supposed to include owners of licensed properties located in zoned areas, those unlicensed in zoned areas, or those unlicensed in unzoned areas. Categories A and B include owners of buildings that collapsed during the quake of February 2023. This means that the residents of the Ferdous building qualify for support within this category. According to our correspondent, no one from the city council or the governorate has informed the residents about the possibility of being included in this support.

A large part of the Ferdous neighbourhood is an informal area that saw significant expansion during the 1990s. It is characterised by high population and building density, narrow streets, and is inhabited by families from Aleppo and migrants from the rural areas around the city. The area is geographically connected to other informal neighbourhoods like Karm Homad, Al-Saliheen, Al-Marjeh, Al-Maadi, Jisr Al-Haj, and Al-Mashhad.

Between 2012 and 2016, the armed opposition controlled the neighbourhood and the wider eastern Aleppo. As a result, the area was subjected to intense shelling, aerial bombings with barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, and missiles from warplanes. This caused direct visible damage to homes and also indirect damage to buildings in the informal areas, which already suffered from weak reinforcement and support, amidst the absence of engineering studies for building, soil, and foundations.

In 2016, regime forces regained control of the Ferdous neighbourhood and all of eastern Aleppo, leading to the forced displacement of most of its inhabitants. Afterwards, the Baqir Brigade and other Shiite factions affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard took control of Ferdous. Since 2016, many residents of the Ferdous neighbourhood have returned to their homes, but extensive security detention campaigns carried out by the Baqir Brigade targeted anyone suspected of opposing the regime among the returnees, prompting them to leave again between 2017 and 2018 to opposition-controlled areas in the northwest or the northeast where the Syrian Democratic Forces hold power. A significant number of these people sold their homes in Ferdous at low prices.

The Ferdous district has experienced successive building collapses since 2016, the most recent of which occurred on September 7, 2022, when a five-storey building collapsed, killing 13 people, including women and children from two families.