Testimonies: Women Who Lost Their Husbands and Their HLP Rights
Many Syrian women who have lost their husbands to wartime battles, detainments, or forced disappearances have lost their housing, land, and property rights. Some of these women have found themselves amid difficult choices: either they preserve their HLP rights under conditions dictated by the families of their deceased husbands, or they lose those rights altogether.
Samar is a woman in her 30s with two children. In late 2011, after armed clashes erupted between regime and opposition forces in their hometown of Al-Mleiha in East Ghouta, the family fled to Jaramana, a Damascus suburb that remained under regime control. There, they rented a house in the hope that the clashes would soon subside and they could return to Al-Mleiha. But that hope was shattered. Samar’s husband, a blacksmith with no interest in opposition activity, was arrested during a security raid in Jaramana. Security forces targeted him merely because he was from Al-Mleiha, a type of arrest known in Syria as being “due to identity.” Samar was unable to find information about his fate or his captors.
Samar married young, gave birth to two children, and became a stay-at-home parent. She was unable to complete her education and never worked outside the house. When her husband was arrested, she could no longer pay rent. She and her children moved into a commercial warehouse in Jaramana, whose owner sympathised with them and let them stay for free. Samar found sporadic work cleaning houses in Jaramana to feed her family.
By coincidence, Samar learned in mid-2015 that her husband had been killed under torture. Then in 2018, after regime forces recaptured all of East Ghouta, she returned to Al-Mleiha, where her husband’s family had a multi-storey apartment building. Samar’s husband owned an apartment in the building and a shop on the ground floor.
Samar’s father-in-law suggested that she marry another of his sons who was already married and had children. He justified the suggestion by explaining to Samar that she was a single woman and would need to marry. It would be preferable, he reasoned, for her to marry her brother-in-law, thereby protecting her children and preserving her deceased husband’s property. He also implicitly threatened Samar that in refusing the marriage proposal, she would not be able to return to live in the family building or receive the rental proceeds from her husband’s shop and could even lose custody of her children. Samar tried convincing her father-in-law that she would never remarry and devote herself to raising the children in the family home under his supervision. But Samar’s father-in-law insisted that her return to the building depended on her marrying her late husband’s brother.
Samar refused the marriage offer. Her years in Jaramana, a relatively diverse area that felt more open-minded than Al-Mleiha’s mostly conservative atmosphere, contributed to Samar’s decision, she told The Syria Report. Living in Jaramana taught Samar to depend on herself rather than follow societal expectations and to emulate role models of educated and self-reliant working women.
Samar said she decided to stick with her decision and face the consequences. She and her children stayed in the warehouse in Jaramana, but this time she started working in a shop while continuing to clean homes. The additional income allowed her to start paying half the rent to the warehouse owner after years of living there for free. As a result, Samar gained self-confidence and felt capable of facing her husband’s family. She requested help from a group of activists in Jaramana to secure legal support to maintain custody of her children. However, Samar was barred from living in her husband’s family home and receiving the income from his shop.
Nawal’s story played out differently. Originally from Qalamoun in Rural Damascus, Nawal decided to submit to her husband’s family after he was killed by stray gunfire in 2016. A mother and an engineer, she was financially independent and supported her own family. Still, she faced intense pressure from her deceased husband’s family to marry one of his surviving brothers amid threats that she could lose many of her rights if she refused. As with Samar, her father-in-law led efforts to pressure Nawal into the marriage. According to him, Nawal conveys, the deceased husband had been very wealthy and left behind assets that should remain within the family.
Nawal’s father-in-law pressured her to marry her late husband’s brother, who was several years younger than her. When his efforts failed, he incited his sons to seize the remaining real estate and other properties, all of which were registered equally between Nawal and her deceased husband. Still, Nawal could not dispose of any of the properties, except for the house in which she still lived with her children. Meanwhile, her father-in-law disposed of his late son’s properties as if they were his own, preventing Nawal from receiving any of the earnings.
Faced with the prospect of losing all of her and her husband’s properties and the shares belonging to her children, Nawal decided to marry her brother-in-law in the end. She told The Syria Report she wanted to live in peace with her children and ensure that they would inherit their late father’s assets.