Report: Ownership, Planning, and Population Transformations in Damascus’ Informal Settlements, and Their Impact on Women’s Rights

You can download a PDF version of this report here.

The author of this report is Mazen Ezzi, the editor of the Housing, Land and Property Rights Section at The Syria Report.

In the decades preceding Syria’s 2011 revolution and the ensuing civil war, informal settlements were not merely an urban margin cut off from the cities, but lived spaces connected to them. They housed wide segments of low-income people, students, employees, and workers who could not afford housing in zoned neighbourhoods. In the informal settlements, patterns of housing and work formed, as well as social relations, which together created a shared way of life in the face of inequality and discrimination in Baathist Syria, and in the face of government planning policies that saw these neighbourhoods only as a visual eyesore to be removed. Although these areas consisted of unlicensed housing, with weak water, sanitation, and electricity infrastructure, and buildings that did not meet structural safety standards, they nonetheless gave their residents a sense of homeownership, even if that home was in an informal settlement.

In this wider context, the city of Damascus today is encircled by a broad belt of informal settlements, including parts of Qaboun and Jobar in the northeast, and from Yarmouk camp to the Tadhamon neighbourhood in the south, reaching Al-Qadam and Al-Asali in the southwest, in addition to the Mazzeh 86 and Al-Sumariya informal areas in the west. This belt comprises more than 18 informal settlements covering around 2,000 hectares, and was home to approximately 1.2 million people before 2011. The housing in these areas arose on public or waqf (religious endowment) land, or on agricultural land on which construction was prohibited, and expanded due to migration from the countryside, low prices, delays in issuing zoning plans, and shortcomings in social and cooperative housing policies. During the war years, specifically between 2012 and 2018, these informal settlements experienced divergent trajectories. Some went out of regime control and were subjected to siege, shelling, destruction, and displacement, as in Qaboun, Jobar, Tadhamon, Al-Qadam, Al-Asali, and the Yarmouk camp. Others, such as Mazzeh 86 and Al-Sumariya, remained under Assad regime control but saw unlicensed urban expansion, and later, after the regime’s fall, turned into arenas for security and social pressures that led to threats of eviction and the seizure of property.

In many cases, a family’s ownership in the informal settlements does not exceed a few undivided shares in common property, documented by a sale contract registered at the notary or by an irrevocable power of attorney, with the original documents lost and the number of co-owners rising through inheritance after arrest, killing under torture, or displacement. This leaves rights to land, housing, and property hanging by a thread. This is the reality in dozens of informal settlements in Syria, where nearly 40 percent of the population lives.

Under such conditions, return to the informal settlements is not limited to overcoming issues of rubble and destruction, but also collides with the absence of a legal and planning framework that guarantees the rehabilitation of damaged housing and the provision of public safety. There are also restrictive laws still in place that criminalise unlicensed construction, leaving returnees facing a choice between living in unsafe homes or remaining in an open-ended state of displacement. Here, there is a need for new policies that address legal and administrative gaps, regulate reconstruction through engineering surveys and technical committees, and provide financial and technical support to the most vulnerable families, instead of turning return into an individual, costly process that only those with resources can afford.

Within this framework, this paper examines Jobar, Qaboun, Tadhamon, Al-Qadam, Al-Asali, the Yarmouk camp, Mazzeh 86, and Al-Sumariya as different case studies within the Damascus informal settlement “belt” after the fall of the Assad regime. In these informal areas, women have been the most vulnerable to losing their housing and property rights, due to the difficulty of proving them in a patriarchal society that tends to register property in the names of male children. As a result of arrests, enforced disappearances, and displacement affecting these men, women’s housing and property rights are at risk of loss amid damage, lost documents, or the difficulty of proving rights given the informal nature of these areas and their inadequate documentation in the Land Registry.

Accordingly, this paper begins from a central question about how issues of ownership and its documentation, the need for new planning schemes, and population shifts linked to displacement and return, reveal the challenges faced by returnees and residents in these informal settlements – especially women – in securing their rights to housing and property and to living in stable environments after the fall of the Assad regime.

One: Demographic Transformations, Return of IDPs, and Zoning

Since 2011, Damascus’s informal settlements have witnessed divergent demographic trajectories, depending on each area’s location and the nature of the military-political control over it. Neighbourhoods that came under opposition control, such as Jobar, Qaboun, Tadhamon, Al-Qadam, and Al-Asali, were subjected to siege, bombardment, and widespread destruction, which culminated in the near-total displacement of the population. After the regime’s fall, some residents returned to inspect their properties in these areas, only to find devastated neighbourhoods that were difficult to live in, and returns remained limited, confined to those who could afford repairs or had no alternative.

By contrast, other informal settlements such as Al-Sumariya and Mazzeh 86 were spared destruction during the war, but after the regime’s fall they experienced security and social pressures that led to evictions, harassment, and threats targeting the residents.

Damascus’s informal settlements appear split into two completely different trajectories: a trajectory of displacement, destruction, and slow return; and a trajectory of new forms of pressure and eviction. This renders population stability in these areas fragile and directly affected by the political and security shifts that accompanied the regime’s fall.

• Tadhamon

Hundreds of people returned to the Tadhamon neighbourhood south of Damascus after the fall of the Assad regime, in a partial return aimed at inspecting damaged properties or initiating limited attempts at rehabilitation. Many homes were destroyed, and most returnees could not afford repairs, while others preferred to wait for an improvement in economic conditions. In the southern section, destruction exceeded 65 per cent, making it almost uninhabitable: no electricity, no water, no telecommunications, and the streets between alleyways remained largely blocked by rubble until residents themselves began opening them. The efforts of official bodies were limited to removing some of the old concrete blocks that Assad’s forces had placed, without any genuine intervention to rehabilitate the infrastructure. The neighbourhood’s streets remain full of potholes and debris accumulated over years of fighting.

Tadhamon emerged at the end of the 1960s on agricultural land belonging to the city of Damascus, after thousands of people from the Golan and Quneitra were displaced following the 1967 war against Israel. The neighbourhood later expanded by receiving new waves of arrivals from various governorates, and its alleyways came to be named after the origin of their residents. Before 2011, Tadhamon’s population reached about 200,000 people, and it was one of the largest informal neighbourhoods south of Damascus. Its built environment consisted of unlicensed housing constructed on agricultural land, with unregulated property and documents that were difficult to formalise. Weak services had been a defining feature since its inception, and the neighbourhood did not benefit from any urban development or sustainable services before the war.

Since 2011, Tadhamon has undergone successive military and demographic transformations. Some of its residents rose against the regime, and the opposition took control of its southern sector in 2012, exposing it to ongoing siege and bombardment that caused extensive destruction. In 2015, the southern sector came under the control of the so-called Islamic State (Daesh), and most of the remaining residents fled. At the beginning of 2018, Assad regime forces regained control of the neighbourhood after a military campaign that ended with the forced displacement of those who remained to northern Syria. From that time until the regime’s fall in 2024, Tadhamon was held under tight security control, and many buildings were systematically destroyed to extract metals for recycling. No efforts to reconstruct or regulate return succeeded, and the neighbourhood remained neglected, with no serious rehabilitation process.

After 2018, the Damascus governorate began speaking of rehabilitating the neighbourhood, but limited itself to forming a committee to implement Law No. 3 on rubble removal, without actually applying its provisions. In September 2020, the governorate allowed a gradual return of displaced residents, albeit under strict conditions. Those wishing to return had to submit formal applications, including personal documents, proof of ownership, and financial clearance, all of which were referred to military intelligence, which decided whether to approve or reject the request. The criteria were unclear, and many residents were denied return on security grounds or because of prior links to opposition figures.

• Yarmouk Palestinian Camp

Life is slowly returning to Yarmouk camp, south of Damascus, as the number of returnees rises and they seek to repair their damaged homes, without any real support from official bodies or international organisations. Repairs are financed by the residents themselves and through limited initiatives from the local community. Basic services are still weak: electricity and water do not reach many streets, transport is almost non-existent, and the roads are full of rubble and potholes.

Since the beginning of 2025, an estimated 3,000 families have come back home to Yarmouk, in a return driven more by personal capacities than by any official plan. Some residents visit the camp only temporarily, to secure their homes against theft or to prevent fraudulent transactions on their property, without a real possibility of settling there. In the absence of a clear planning vision and amid severe deterioration in services, life in the camp is linked to individual resources rather than institutions.

Yarmouk camp was established in 1957 to house Palestinian refugees after the 1948 Nakba, on 200 hectares of land expropriated by the Syrian state and placed under the authority of the General Authority for Palestinian Refugees (GAPAR). Before 2011, its population ranged between 500,000 and 600,000 people, including about 160,000 Palestinian refugees, with the rest made up of Syrians and other residents. Over time, the camp acquired a densely built urban character and saw major urban expansion that made it a natural extension of the adjacent Damascene neighbourhoods. Most property in the camp was not formal title deeds but rather “residency permits” issued by GAPAR. This legal status made ownership and proof of rights extremely complicated. Many properties were jointly owned and undivided, facilitating disputes and fraud, and leading to the widespread use of customary contracts and unregistered documents, thereby weakening the protection of property rights.

Between 2011 and 2018, the camp became a battlefield subjected to a long siege by Assad regime forces. It was successively controlled by opposition factions and then by the Islamic State in 2015. Aerial and artillery bombardment was intense, with later participation by Russian aircraft, causing large-scale destruction and the forced displacement of most residents. When the regime regained control in 2018, only a few hundred families remained, and destruction was widespread.

During the years of Assad control between 2018 and 2024, large-scale looting continued, including the demolition of rooftops to extract the iron and the sale of household items as scrap. Property fraud also spread, relying on stolen or forged personal and ownership documents, with ownership transferred through fictitious sale confirmation lawsuits brought before the courts. These practices increased the extent of destruction and drove many property owners to return temporarily to protect their real estate from seizure or illegal sale.

Since 2018, the Yarmouk camp has been subjected to a series of contradictory planning measures. The independent local committee that had administered the camp since 1962 was dissolved and replaced by a service department directly subordinate to the Damascus governorate. In 2020, a new zoning plan was proposed under Law No. 5 of 1982, which triggered a large wave of objections because it threatened the rights of Palestinians who did not hold formal titles. The governorate afterward hesitated to adopt the new plan, without cancelling it entirely.

Later, the governorate resorted to selective and opaque implementation of Law No. 3 of 2018 on rubble removal, without issuing official decisions specifying cadastral zones, relying instead on ambiguous notices that threatened residents with fines. Complex conditions were also imposed on return and repairs, including security approval, a paid technical inspection, and the requirement to present electricity, water, and telephone bills dating back to 2012 – services that had in reality been largely cut off.

• Al-Qadam 

Some forcibly displaced people have returned to the informal section of the Al-Qadam neighbourhood after the fall of the Assad regime, while others have remained in northern Syria because of the damage to their homes and their inability to repair them. Those who have returned started repairing their houses at their own expense, despite knowing that the area is subject to re-zoning under Decree No. 66 of 2012.

Al-Qadam developed on the southern outskirts of Damascus and forms a border zone separating the capital from the towns of the southern countryside. It includes a zoned area, where most buildings are multi-storey and licenced, and an informal area of unlicensed housing, in addition to an industrial complex built on land expropriated by the state. Most residents of the zoned sector are originally from Damascus, while residents of the informal zone come from various governorates. The informal area is itself composed of two parts: the first is built without licences on privately owned land classified as agricultural, on which construction is prohibited, where residents hold undivided shares in common property, sale contracts, or court rulings; the second, known as Harat Al-Mahatta (the Station Quarter), is built on land expropriated in the 1970s for the Ministry of Defence. None of these dwellings is individually registered in the Land Registry.

In 2012, opposition factions formed of neighbourhood residents took control of Al-Qadam’s informal sector, before regime forces re-established control in 2018 and forcibly displaced the residents to northern Syria. During the war, the Al-Qadam industrial complex went out of service and was subjected to destruction and looting as control alternated between armed groups, until regime forces regained control in April 2018.

The informal area, built on private agricultural land in Al-Qadam, was incorporated into the zoning plan for the second zoned real estate area named in Decree No. 66, known as Basilia City. Early this past October, the Damascus governorate, through the neighbourhood mukhtar, requested that returnees submit documents proving ownership of properties located within the scope of Decree No. 66 to the Decree Implementation Directorate. This request split residents’ positions on how to deal with Decree No. 66. Dozens of residents submitted their documents to the directorate to register their rights and secure them in the official records, while many others refrained, mostly because their homes were unlicensed and therefore unrecorded in the Land Registry.

However, on October 20, the Damascus governorate announced it would freeze the Basilia City project until the People’s Assembly rules on Decree No. 66, stressing that the governorate does not have the authority to amend or cancel it, and that the fate of the zone will be determined by what the Assembly decides.

After the return of displaced residents, disputes emerged over the ownership of some plots and houses in Harat Al-Mahatta, after some residents claimed to be the original owners of the expropriated land on which these homes had been built. Harat Al-Mahatta had been expropriated for the Ministry of Defence in the 1970s, but officers led at the time by Rifaat Al-Assad seized some plots and built private houses on them. During the Syrian war, officers from the Republican Guard and Fourth Division seized additional plots and built more houses. Some of the original owners of the expropriated land have recently demanded the eviction of residents from the homes built on their land, relying on their old ownership deeds. These demands escalated into protests and attacks on residents, prompting intervention by the Public Security forces, which referred the disputing parties to the courts.

• Al-Asali 

Despite having permission to enter, no one has returned home to the Al-Asali neighbourhood since the fall of the Assad regime, due to the extensive destruction it suffered during the war years. The local infrastructure is completely damaged, while the ruined buildings have had all the iron removed from them, and are no longer suitable for rehabilitation.

Al-Asali, a large informal settlement, lies at the far south of Damascus and falls administratively under Al-Qadam. It grew around the Al-Asali tekkiya (Sufi lodge), dating back to 1636, which was a religious endowment providing free meals to those in need and passers-by. Over time, the informal settlement expanded over parts of this waqf (religious endowment) land through encroachment and self-build, so that some houses were built on endowed land, in addition to dwellings built on private agricultural land where construction was prohibited. Before 2011, tens of thousands of people, mostly newcomers to Damascus from Daraa governorate due to geographic proximity and low prices, lived in the neighbourhood. Houses in the informal settlement were unlicensed and unlisted in the Land Registry, and residents relied on ownership documents issued by notaries and court rulings.

Between 2012 and 2015, the neighbourhood was under opposition control, before the Islamic State took over in July 2015 and expelled the opposition. The neighbourhood remained under IS control until June 2018, when Assad regime forces reconquered it. During this period, Al-Asali was subjected to heavy bombardment by Russian aircraft, as well as rocket and artillery fire from the Fourth Division, causing widespread destruction of residential buildings and infrastructure, and the displacement of most residents. After the regime regained control, looting was completed, rooftops were demolished, and iron was removed, turning the neighbourhood into a completely ruined, uninhabited area.

Al-Asali was included in the Decree No. 66 second zoned real estate area, known as Basilia City. In March 2018, the Damascus governorate announced it had issued a zoning plan and requested that property owners prove their ownership to determine their shares or the type of compensation. Many residents were unable to provide proof because they were outside Syria, in opposition-held areas, had lost their documents, or were wanted by the security services.

Today, because the neighbourhood falls within the second regulatory zone, any urban planning there has been postponed until the People’s Assembly examines Decree No. 66 of 2012, as decided by the governor of Damascus in October 2025. The governor explained that work is currently underway to form a specialised technical committee made up of relevant bodies and professional unions, with the participation of representatives of the residents of the Decree No. 66 areas, to find solutions and proposals and make the necessary recommendations for redressing grievances.

At the same time, the governorate has set up a special centre for registering ownership in Al-Asali. Many residents have submitted their supporting documents, including sale contracts and powers of attorney, along with electricity and water bills, pending examination by legal committees. With the neighbourhood still destroyed and empty of residents, Al-Asali inhabitants organised a protest in mid-October in front of the Damascus governorate building, demanding the repeal of Decree No. 66 and the restoration of their rights.

• Jobar 

Jobar, one of the most devastated neighbourhoods of the capital during the war, remains uninhabited after the fall of the Assad regime. Residents’ return has generally been limited to temporary visits to inspect their ruined homes or protect them from fraud and seizure, as they are unable to rebuild in the absence of any clear official reconstruction plan.

Jobar was originally a rural village in Eastern Ghouta before it was annexed to Damascus in 1968 under an urban expansion plan drawn up by French architect Michel Écochard. In subsequent decades, the neighbourhood experienced major urban expansion, some of it planned and some informal, until it became a densely populated area containing religious and historical landmarks such as the Al-Omari mosque and the Jobar Synagogue. Before 2011, its population was estimated at around 300,000 people. Many properties in the neighbourhood were unlicensed homes built on agricultural land or in expansion zones, which made their documentation and the proof of rights unstable for the residents.

In 2012, Jobar fell under the control of opposition armed factions and witnessed devastating battles and heavy shelling by regime forces, resulting in near-total destruction and the displacement of residents to East Ghouta or to Damascus. In 2015, the opposition set up defensive fortifications, most notably trenches and tunnels, and bombardment of the neighbourhood continued until regime forces retook it in March 2018, forcibly displacing most of the remaining residents to northern Syria. Since then, Jobar has remained empty. Occasional demolition and rubble removal has continued at a low level, while the security services prevented residents from returning even to inspect their homes.

In June 2022, the Damascus governorate prepared detailed zoning plan No. 106 to reorganise Jobar, based on the Planning and Urban Development Law No. 23 of 2015, which allows administrative units to confiscate up to 50 per cent of private property free of charge. The scheme redrew administrative boundaries by expanding the neighbourhood to 304 hectares and annexing parts of Irbin, Zamalka, Ayn Tarma, and Qaboun.

After the regime’s fall, the Damascus Urban Planning Directorate began studying a new zoning plan for the neighbourhood and submitted it to the Executive Office, but it has not yet been formally approved. As the governorate delayed announcing its planning strategy, residents formed a civic body called the Jobar Board of Trustees to prepare an alternative masterplan based on a comprehensive reconstruction of the neighbourhood. It proposed reorganising Jobar into five residential blocks and documenting individual rights through a legal committee affiliated with the Board. Displaced residents who have returned submitted alternative proposals, including the construction of modern housing or reverting to the pre-2011 planning scheme, allowing residents to repair their homes rather than demolishing them.

The delay by the Damascus governorate in announcing its planning strategy prompted dozens of residents to organise a protest in mid-October at the entrance to Jobar from the side of Abbasiyyin Square, at the invitation of the newly formed Youth of Jobar Association, in coordination with the Board of Trustees.

• Qaboun 

The Qaboun neighbourhood today lies in a state of near-total destruction, with only limited returns by displaced residents to a few homes that suffered partial damage and where they have managed to carry out basic repairs for temporary residence. Nonetheless, the majority of the neighbourhood remains unfit for habitation: destruction is widespread, basic services are almost non-existent, and roads are strewn with rubble and trenches.

The Damascus governorate is concerned about the structural safety of many buildings that have not undergone any engineering assessment in recent years. The area needs a comprehensive survey to ensure it is free of war remnants and unexploded ordnance, while the cost of rebuilding infrastructure remains extremely high. The governorate is also unable to provide alternative housing, which postpones any executive plan until a complete database of property and adequate financing are secured.

The history of Qaboun is linked to its emergence as an interwoven residential and industrial area at Damascus’s northern entrance. Over the decades, it has contained both planned and informal sections, in addition to religious endowment (waqf) properties such as the Sinan Pasha area. The industrial zone in Qaboun was established by decree in 1948 and reorganised twice, in 1972 and 1984, with land taken for public services. The residential area, meanwhile, includes housing built on agricultural land or in expansion zones, much of it unlicensed and not recorded in the Land Registry.

The opposition controlled the neighbourhood between 2012 and 2017, during which it witnessed fierce battles accompanied by heavy aerial and artillery bombardment. The regime adopted a policy of systematic demolition to push the factions away and prevent them from using buildings to infiltrate, snipe, or shell the capital. The first demolition operations targeted around two thousand homes and commercial premises from July 2012 onwards, then expanded after the Assad regime regained control of the industrial zone at the end of 2013, reaching the intercity bus garages and the Al-Khumasiyya Company. Between February and May 2017, regime forces used “Elephant” rockets and TNT hoses, which led to near-total destruction of the Baaleh area, the Alwan Project, and the strip adjacent to the Damascus–Homs motorway. In May 2017, the neighbourhood was subjected to a “reconciliation” agreement that entailed the displacement of 400 families to Idlib, while around 130 families remained, and thousands of residents were displaced to Damascus, its countryside, or abroad. After the regime regained control, new demolition operations began with the aim of extracting iron, and continued for years under the supervision of bodies linked to the Fourth Division and the Republican Guard, with lorries transporting the extracted iron to factories for recycling.

Since 2018, Qaboun has entered a long trajectory of planning and rezoning. The first track concerned industrial Qaboun, whose regulatory plan No. 104 was issued in June 2019, followed by the creation within it of a zoning area under Decree No. 237 in September 2021, based on Law No. 10 of 2018. The decree changed the land use classification of the area from industrial and agricultural to residential and commercial. The second track concerns residential Qaboun, where the governorate announced in June 2020 the detailed zoning plan No. 105 under the provisions of Law No. 23 of 2015, opening a one-month period for objections. However, the plan has remained since then without ratification. In 2022, the governorate agreed to grant repair permits only for licensed properties, on condition of obtaining security approval and proof of structural safety, and a pledge not to claim any compensation when the regulatory plan is implemented, while buildings at risk of collapse were excluded from any repair permit.

Today, the zoning plans proposed for Al-Qaboun remain at the study stage, without any move towards implementation. The Damascus governorate is working to review its urban vision for the area in light of the lack of funding and the absence of reconstruction offers, while the complex nature of property ownership, limited return of residents, and weak services all obstruct any practical course of action. The governorate indicates that the neighbourhood needs a wide-ranging engineering survey and the provision of housing solutions for those affected before any executive step can be considered. The Directorate of Planning and Urbanisation in Damascus governorate confirms that no local or foreign entities have come forward to participate in reconstruction, and that all current activity is limited to assessing the plans and linking them to the surrounding urban fabric. The governorate has also begun preparing offices to receive residents in order to record and document ownership.

• Al-Sumariya

Since the fall of the Assad regime, Al-Sumariya has turned into a troubled area whose residents live under daily pressure, with large waves of displacement recorded as a result of the siege, raids, and repeated threats. Excavation works have taken place near houses to build a metal wall, and coloured markings have appeared on the walls of a number of homes, provoking fears of a new wave of evictions like that of this past August. These pressures increased with the takeover of the neighbourhood by an armed group from Moadhamiyat Al-Sham, which closed the entrances, restricted residents’ movement, prevented food supplies from entering, arrested men, women and children, and forced some to sign undertakings to vacate. With the pressure continuing and the governorate unable to intervene, most residents of the neighbourhood have been displaced, and only those who have nowhere else to go remain.

Al-Sumariya formed gradually from the 1970s onwards with the construction of military housing on land that the state had expropriated in the 1950s from Moadhamiyat Al-Sham. The housing was built on land belonging to the Ministries of Defence and Interior and to the Damascus governorate, alongside military installations such as Air Force Intelligence and Al-Mazzeh Airport. Next to this housing, an informal area emerged containing around 1,700 dwellings.

Before 2011, the neighbourhood was known as an emerging residential area on the western outskirts of Damascus, inhabited mainly by Alawite non-commissioned officers, soldiers and civil servants. Ownership in Al-Sumariya is mixed: there is functional military housing, which is part of social housing programmes sold in installments, in addition to informal housing built on public land. This makes the nature of ownership unstable and prone to disputes, especially in light of the scarcity of official information and the lack of clarity in distinguishing between functional and social housing types.

Between 2011 and 2024, Al-Sumariya remained outside the scope of direct military operations, but it witnessed profound transformations with the collapse of the security and military apparatuses stationed there, especially the Fourth Division and Air Force Intelligence. The fall of the regime led large numbers of soldiers and their families to flee the military housing for fear of reprisals, leaving a major security vacuum exploited by an armed group from Moadhamiyat Al-Sham, which entered the neighbourhood, fired into the air and threatened residents. Its takeover was accompanied by the looting and burning of some empty houses and shops. Since early 2025, the pressure has escalated, with reports circulating of orders to evacuate the military housing. The neighbourhood has, in effect, come under the control of an armed group that imposes a siege, prevents the entry of food and medicine, arrests residents and subjects them to sectarian insults, leading to successive waves of displacement.

In 2024 and 2025, Al-Sumariya did not see any new zoning plan or official intervention to address the housing and ownership situation, despite the Damascus governorate’s confirmation, in an official letter, that it is responsible for the informal settlements in the neighbourhood and that no action may be taken without referring back to it. Even so, the governorate has been unable to prevent the raids, siege, or threats of eviction, and has not provided any alternative solutions for residents. In recent weeks, excavation works have appeared, which the governorate says are part of a project to build a wall implemented by the Military Construction Establishment. However, a local committee of Al-Sumariya residents has indicated that the route of the wall will isolate large parts of the area, block roads and encircle an entire school, and that water pipes have been damaged without any official clarification.

• Al-Mazzeh 86 

Residents of the informal settlement of Al-Mazzeh 86 are living in a state of mounting anxiety since the fall of the Assad regime, after the circulation of a statement attributed to an unknown body calling itself the Neighbourhoods Committee of the Al-Mazzeh Area, in which it demanded the restoration of land it said had been seized by force over past decades. The statement sparked widespread fear among residents, especially as it described the informal settlement as built on land seized by coercion and without any legal basis, while many residents do not possess documents proving their rights to their homes. Residents are facing great uncertainty about the future of their houses, particularly as the area suffers from repeated landslides and contains homes at risk of collapse that were evacuated previously, with their owners granted alternative housing as an exception. This coincided with social disputes over entitlement to housing, in the absence of any clear regulatory measures or official intervention that might reassure residents about their situation.

The informal settlement of Al-Mazzeh 86 began to emerge in the late 1970s on public land, some of it expropriated for the Ministry of Defence, next to Battalion 86 of the Defence Companies, led at the time by Rifaat Al-Assad. Before that, the area had been a natural woodland and orchards belonging to the people of Al-Mazzeh. It then turned into an informal settlement built up gradually without planning. In the 1980s, housing expanded and multi-storey buildings began to appear, and growth peaked in the late 1990s with an increase in unlicensed construction. Many homes were built on land classified as public property or expropriated land, and some on undivided communal land whose ownership belonged to Damascene families before being subjected to formal expropriation decisions. Residents also paid fees known as turabiyya in return for occupying the land, without those payments conferring any legal status. However, they were later used as an implicit reference in cases of eviction or reorganisation.

Between 2011 and 2024 Al-Mazzeh 86 remained outside the scope of direct military operations, but it served as a residential centre for tens of thousands of working-class Alawites and Assad’s security and military apparatuses. The fall of the regime led to social and political transformations that were reflected in the neighbourhood, with neighbourhood committees resuming their activities and some of them being reconstituted, in order to participate in disarmament and to coordinate with the transitional administration. The neighbourhood did not see large waves of displacement like those that occurred elsewhere, but it was affected by the shifts that accompanied the collapse of the security and military apparatuses which had formed part of its demographic make-up. These transformations came alongside new disputes over land ownership between residents and committees claiming to represent the original inhabitants of Al-Mazzeh.

Al-Mazzeh 86 has not been subject to any new zoning plan since the 1990s, when the governorate proposed a plan that was never implemented. After 2024, the governorate did not issue any new urban vision for the neighbourhood and did not put forward any regulatory measures to address its situation.

Two: Women’s rights in Damascus’s informal settlements

Women have been the most vulnerable group within Damascus’s informal settlements after the fall of the Assad regime. This is a result of the overlap between large-scale demographic shifts, unregulated housing patterns, unregistered ownership, and patriarchal norms governing property registration and the management of housing matters.

The cases documented in Tadhamon, Yarmouk, Qadam, Al-Asali, Jobar, Qaboun, Al-Sumariya, and Al-Mazzeh 86 show that this vulnerability is not only linked to destruction or loss of documents, but also to a legal and social structure that has limited women’s access to rights of housing, tenure, and ownership since before the war.

According to Nour Harastani, an architect and director of the urban affairs research group Syrbanism, understanding women’s conditions in these areas requires differentiating between three basic levels of rights: housing, tenure, and ownership. The right to housing does not necessarily mean owning the property, but rather the ability to access adequate shelter. Historically, informal settlements have provided a practical alternative for housing in the absence of effective housing policies, but this right has remained without clear legal protection. After the war, women faced compounded difficulties in reclaiming this right, whether due to bans on return in some areas under regime control, as in Al-Tadhamon, or because of fragile service infrastructure and widespread property fraud, as in Yarmouk, where the absence of infrastructure and official oversight combined to make women’s stability more precarious.

As for tenure, which is the basis for obtaining compensation or alternative housing in the event of demolition or reorganisation, Ms Harastani points out that women face major gaps. Tenure is usually proven through physical presence or documents such as electricity and water bills and tax assessments, most of which are registered in men’s names. Since women were often the first to leave these areas during the war for security reasons, while today the return is concentrated among men, the absence of their physical presence and the absence of documents in their names reduces their ability to prove their connection to the place. This problem is evident in Al-Qadam, where women rely on undivided shares or old contracts that are difficult to formalise, and in Al-Asali, where ownership is based on notary deeds that are not registered, especially in houses built on religious endowment (waqf) land. In Jobar and Qaboun, the removal of rubble before rights were recorded has further increased the difficulty of proving tenure for women-headed households.

At the level of ownership, the complications run even deeper. Ownership in most of these informal settlements is unregistered or based on sale powers of attorney, undivided shareholdings, or customary contracts, usually recorded in men’s names. With the death or enforced disappearance of large numbers of men during the war, women have faced legal obstacles related to unregistered marriages, unequal inheritance shares, or limited financial capacity to formalise rights.

Human rights and feminist activist Mona Freij notes that the problem lies not only in the documents themselves, but in an entire structure where gender inequality intersects with the absence of gender-sensitive laws and with economic and social violence that limits women’s ability to protect their rights. She says that the legal procedures linked to Decree No. 66, Law No. 10, and regulatory decisions have, in practice, turned into tools that exclude women, because they assume the existence of documents or formal presence that women cannot always provide. The threats of eviction and blackmail faced by women during the war also reflect the use of housing as a tool of social control, and the absence of legal protection and basic services during the reconstruction phase has often rendered women’s rights invisible.

The paper “Housing, Land and Property Rights: Gendered Challenges and Pathways for Action”, issued by the Women’s Housing, Land and Property Rights Working Group in November 2023, points to an additional problem that Syrian urban policies generally do not address: the absence of any gender-based classification of data relating to housing, tenure, or return. There are no official records showing who owns, who lives, who returns, or who is prevented from returning. This leaves women outside the scope of institutional monitoring and prevents any assessment of how regulatory decisions affect them. This absence also limits the ability of local bodies or organisations to track property disputes that affect women and to develop effective response mechanisms in environments undergoing major urban transformation after the fall of the regime.

This situation intersects with customs and traditions that make women’s access to housing, tenure, and ownership conditional on the male members of the family, as properties are often registered in the names of husbands, brothers, or fathers, while women’s ownership is not viewed as part of the usual practice. Although women can prove ownership in several ways, such as customary contracts, testimonies, or financial records, restrictive social norms, weak purchasing power, and economic dependence on men all make it difficult for women to obtain a document or actual ownership.

This exclusion is reinforced by the absence of women from local committees and appeal boards that are tasked with reviewing regulatory plans or the status of areas. Women’s representation on these committees is almost non-existent, whether in the councils formed to manage neighbourhoods or in appeals committees, depriving them of participation in decisions that will determine the future of their homes. After the fall of the regime, there has been no fundamental change in this regard, as women’s presence in local levels of decision-making remains limited, while most community initiatives continue to be launched without sufficient female participation or consideration of gender.

Current urban policies also fail to recognise the right to housing for the most vulnerable groups and do not provide mechanisms to ensure that women benefit from housing programmes or rehabilitation projects, despite the major changes in family structures in Syria and the increase in the proportion of households headed by women. Without clear mechanisms to facilitate women’s access to property documents, to recognise customary contracts when they are the only available means, or to expand opportunities for alternative housing within regulatory projects, the right to housing remains tied to financial and documentary factors that many women simply do not possess.

Analysis of the different cases indicates the need to develop policies that ensure women can register property in their own names, have effective representation on local committees, enjoy easy access to undamaged land records, and benefit from legal mechanisms that protect them from property fraud. There is also a need to empower them economically so that they can maintain or obtain housing in environments undergoing extensive urban and regulatory change. In light of the persistence of customs and traditions that limit women’s participation in decision-making, raising legal awareness and strengthening women’s presence in local processes becomes a key step to ensure that reconstruction does not become a path that deepens marginalisation and doubles their housing insecurity.

Three: Towards housing justice in informal settlements

The cases studied in Damascus’s informal settlements show that return after the fall of Assad is not a single, simple event, but rather a complex process ranging from temporary visits to check on homes, as in Jobar, Qaboun and Yarmouk, to limited repair attempts in neighbourhoods such as Tadhamon, to partial return driven by fear of losing ownership, as in Al-Qadam. This is in contrast to informal settlements that did not experience destruction during the war, such as Al-Mazzeh 86 and Al-Sumariya, but which have entered a new phase of pressure, evictions and threats to reopen property files from their roots. In all these contexts, informal settlements are caught between physical rubble that restricts return and legal and procedural rubble that makes proving the right to housing and ownership closer to an open battle with local administrations, legal committees, and armed groups.

In the informal settlements of Damascus covered by this paper, additional layers of constraints are added, linked to regulatory plans and laws governing construction and planning. Most of these settlements are still governed by a series of regulations such as Law No. 23 of 2015, Decree No. 66 of 2012, and Law No. 10 of 2018, despite new proposals, both official and community-based, to introduce amendments and more equitable regulatory plans. However, these planning schemes collide with the lack of funding for any implementation, the absence of reconstruction offers, and the absence of a clear vision for providing alternative housing. This leaves the informal settlements suspended between promises of reconstruction and the reality of non-implementation.

The cases of women in informal settlements show that their vulnerability is not only linked to missing documents or lost homes during the war years, but to an entire structure of norms and legal and administrative provisions that shaped access to housing before and after the fall of the regime. Unregistered ownership, customary contracts that have been the dominant mode of dealing with housing in these areas, and tenure based on physical presence or on service records usually registered in men’s names have all limited women’s ability to regain housing or secure their rights to it. The lack of gender-disaggregated data, the weak ability to access property justice, and the absence of women’s representation on local committees and appeals boards have left women outside any institutional process aimed at addressing housing conditions in the post-Assad phase.

This reality reveals that the fragility of women’s housing rights in informal settlements is not an exceptional circumstance linked only to the war, but the result of a long-term accumulation that combines gender inequality with the absence of housing policies that take into account different ways of accessing a home. In many cases, housing itself has overlapped with forms of social pressure and economic violence, becoming a means of control, blackmail or imposition of dependency. These effects continue today amid unstable return, weak services and planning processes that do not take gender into account.

Given these conditions, there is an urgent need to develop a new approach that ensures effective protection for women’s rights to housing, tenure and ownership within informal settlements. This requires recognising informal forms of proof of the right to housing when they are the only available record, developing community-based verification mechanisms that help women prove their connection to a place, and strengthening access to property documents. It also calls for integrating a gender perspective into urban planning to ensure that regulatory projects take into account households headed by women and their specific housing conditions, and for providing affordable legal support to help them pursue procedures related to ownership and tenure, in addition to improving their economic capacity so they can resist losing housing or being exposed to exploitation.

Women’s participation in urban decision-making processes remains a decisive factor in ensuring their access to rights, as their interests cannot be protected if their presence in committees and local councils remains merely symbolic or absent. Adopting mechanisms for genuine representation and developing programmes for legal awareness within these communities can form a basic step towards a more just approach to addressing housing conditions after the fall of the Assad regime and prevent reconstruction from becoming an opportunity to reproduce vulnerability rather than reduce it.

This overall picture shows that the debate on reconstruction and the return of refugees and internally displaced persons cannot be reduced to the issue of removing rubble or issuing a new zoning plan. The rehabilitation of damaged housing, especially in informal settlements, requires an exceptional legal and regulatory framework that addresses the legacy of undivided ownership, customary contracts and lost documents, and ensures the protection of the most vulnerable groups. There must be policies that recognise informal settlements as real residential spaces, not merely eyesores to be erased, and that link reform of property laws with fair mechanisms for compensation and dissolution of undivided shares. These policies must involve local communities in planning and thinking about the future of their areas, set clear safety standards for repair operations, and grant women a genuine right to register ownership and access safe housing, so that returning to informal settlements does not become a further step towards losing the home, but a possible beginning for rebuilding a more stable and just life.