Rural Damascus Considers Compensation for Decades-Old Suburb Expropriations

The Rural Damascus Governorate is considering reopening the expropriation file of Al-Sham Suburb, formerly known as Harasta Suburb or Al-Assad Suburb, located between the cities of Harasta and Al-Tal. This move comes as the governorate seeks legal and administrative solutions to compensate affected landowners, either through financial compensation at current market value or by granting them residential apartments in unfinished buildings within the suburb, in an attempt to resolve a property dispute that has accumulated for more than four decades.

Al-Sham Suburb, built on an area of about 250 hectares of expropriated land from Harasta and Al-Tal, is one of the most prominent social and cooperative housing projects. Its lands were expropriated under Decree No. 20 of 1983 to construct social and cooperative residential complexes, some of which were military housing allocated for army officers, as well as military sites. The foundation stone of the suburb was laid in 1985, and it had more than 100,000 residents by 2011. Housing cooperatives carried out the cooperative housing projects under the direct supervision of the ministry. Many of them were completed before 2011 and delivered to subscribers, while vast portions of others remained unfinished, with work completely halted after the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime at the end of 2024.

Although it is administratively affiliated with the city of Harasta, the suburb did not suffer the extensive destruction that Harasta witnessed during the war years 2012–2018, which allowed it to continue receiving new residents and construction projects. However, the pace of work in several housing projects in the suburb has noticeably declined due to the suspension of funding and the complex legal status of the expropriated lands, which has prevented the completion and handover of many buildings to subscribers.

In Syrian law, expropriation is based on the idea of public benefit — that is, the state or one of its institutions may confiscate private property to implement a project serving the public interest, provided this is done by official decree and in exchange for fair compensation to the owner. Article 15 of the 2012 Syrian Constitution stipulates that private property is protected and may only be expropriated for public benefit, by decree, and with compensation in accordance with the law. However, Expropriation Law No. 20 of 1983, which remains in force, expanded this right to include almost all public-sector entities, granting them the authority to expropriate property for any purpose falling within the concept of public benefit. The law obliges the expropriating body to determine financial compensation for the affected owners. In practice, however, there have often been violations — lands have been expropriated with long delays in paying compensation, or without payment at all, and without the implementation of projects that genuinely served the public interest on which the expropriation was based.

Residents of Harasta and Al-Tal told The Syria Report that a portion of the expropriated land in the Al-Sham Suburb has not yet undergone the complete compensation procedures for the original owners, despite the establishment of housing cooperatives there. The size of this portion and the number of its original property owners remain unclear. In such cases, the Rural Damascus Governorate is expected to verify these accounts through a legal committee.

After the fall of the Assad regime at the end of 2024, voices began to rise from the city of Al-Tal demanding the restitution of all lands expropriated from them decades ago, arguing that continued construction on those lands constitutes a violation of their rights. In recent months, these demands have turned into open action: on October 26, 2025, dozens of owners held a protest demanding the cancellation of the expropriations and the granting of fair compensation. They also submitted an official letter to Rural Damascus Governor Amer Al-Sheikh, through the district administration, calling for the formation of specialised committees on expropriation files at both the district and governorate levels, in addition to halting all construction work on the expropriated lands until their fate is decided.

The Mayor of Al-Tal, AbdulLatif Mohayssen, told The Syria Report that the municipality had recently received dozens of requests and documents from former owners demanding the return of their lands or fair compensation. He explained that a large portion of these lands had been built upon with residential complexes currently inhabited by hundreds of families, while other parts remain under construction or have been abandoned. Mohayssen stated that the proposed solutions to address the issue include two main options: the first is compensating owners according to the current market value determined by a specialised committee, and the second is granting them residential apartments in unfinished buildings, while calculating the financial differences between the value of the land and the price of the apartment.

The military housing allocated for army officers was among the social housing projects for which officers were entitled to subscribe and purchase at cost price through instalments from state institutions, or to rent throughout their service period at symbolic rates. Some of the owners of these dwellings were Alawite officers serving in Damascus and its countryside. After the fall of the Assad regime, some residents of these units faced harassment, forcing them to leave or sell their homes. There were also instances of armed Islamist groups seizing some of these residences without legal or financial justification, in incidents that sometimes took on a sectarian dimension.

Mohayssen pointed out that a governorate-issued administrative order cannot cancel expropriation decisions. Rather, they require a clear legal framework and a specialised committee to examine each case individually, especially since some owners had received compensation at the time of the expropriation in the 1980s. He added that the file is now with the Rural Damascus Governorate, which is studying it and preparing its proposals before presenting them to the relevant government authorities. He stressed that addressing this issue requires a careful balance between the rights of property owners and the existing residential reality within the suburb.

The file of the expropriated lands of Al-Sham Suburb forms part of a broader issue concerning thousands of unresolved, sometimes decades-old expropriations in Rural Damascus, which have accumulated without fair compensation or final legal settlement. With growing public pressure following the fall of Assad, the governorate now faces a difficult test in resolving these complex cases: it must restore rights to owners without harming current beneficiaries of the housing projects built on those lands. Local authorities are currently awaiting the formation of a new People’s Assembly to propose a comprehensive draft law addressing expropriation issues in Syria and establishing a unified mechanism for compensating affected landowners.