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What Women’s Housing Rights Violations Do Large Family Homes Conceal?

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In the past, many rural Syrian farmers lived with their extended families in large “Arab-style” houses. This was mainly due to the necessities of agricultural life. However, as societies evolved and cities expanded, independence became a need for every family. Mothers and fathers raise their children and work in jobs that are no longer mainly agricultural. Over time, the need for large extended families and communal living in houses declined.

But during the Syrian war, large families were once again pushed together into small houses to save on housing expenses, rent and daily essentials. The return of this form of communal living became a heavy burden on families who were used to independence and were forced to accept it reluctantly.

Afrah, a woman in her 40s, married Salem after a long courtship a few years before the Syrian war. Afrah and Salem rented a small house in the city of Homs, where they were blessed with a daughter. Life wasn’t entirely rosy, interspersed with many problems related to the dissatisfaction of Afrah and Salem’s families with their marriage due to sectarian and regional reasons. Afrah is a Sunni from Homs, while Salem is an Alawite from the Lattakia countryside. Living independently in Homs and working there was helpful in overcoming the pressure of the two families. But their peace didn’t last long.

In 2019, Afrah and her husband left their home after rent became unaffordable and the family moved to the spacious house of Salem’s parents in the Lattakia countryside. However, this decision turned Afrah’s life into a continuous struggle. Problems began with the grandparents intervening in raising the daughters – what they should wear, how they should speak and laugh, who they should talk to and who their friends should be.

Then the issue evolved into direct intervention in Afrah’s life, her clothing, her way of speaking and her daily habits. They even prohibited her from receiving guests in their house because they could not stand her “environment,” and they did not welcome her family’s visits to their home, trying to prevent her from leaving the house to visit her relatives. After a short time, her father-in-law asked her to quit her job. When Afrah refused, the problem escalated until her father-in-law threatened to expel her from the house.

Afrah is now forced to choose between leaving her job or leaving the house. Meanwhile, Salem is stuck between pleasing his elderly father, who opened his house to him and his family, and trying to convince Afrah to comply until the situation improves and they can become independent again. “I’m not sure we’ll be able to live on our own, especially if I leave my job. How can we rent a home with these prices?” said Afrah.

These differences have seeped into the relationship between Afrah and Salem, which Afrah fears might lead to divorce. Then, she would be forced to return with her daughters to her parents’ house, where her brother also lives with his family.

Under Syrian personal status law, the wife has the right to request independent housing if she proves she is being harmed in the in-laws’ house. She can also request a divorce in case her husband does not provide her with housing under specific conditions: suitable for decent living, independent and in a comfortable and respectful environment. However, in today’s Syria, Salem is unable to secure such housing, and Afrah cannot secure an independent home for herself and her daughters.

Woman Faces Abuse Over Decision to Divorce, Case Study

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Reem, an engineer, married her university classmate fifteen years ago. They lived in the city of Lattakia, where they worked hard to ensure a decent living for themselves and their children. During these years, Reem and her husband made it a point to save money and buy a shop, which Reem managed after her day job at a government institution.

Seven years into their marriage, the shop began to do well, so her husband asked Reem to resign from her job and devote her time to managing the business. This request marked the start of disagreements between Reem and her husband. She initially refused, but her husband and family pressured her until she gave in. “My mistake from the beginning was giving in to this pressure. My children were younger then, and I felt afraid, but my compliance at that time led me to my current state,” she says.

Reem quit her job and managed the shop while caring for her children and handling household affairs. Her husband remained at his private engineering office. Over the years, her business thrived, and she expanded the shop and hired more employees. Despite her new field having no relation to her academic specialisation, Reem succeeded in business, so much so that the income from the shop alone was enough to ensure the family’s financial stability.

Although Reem had proven capable of managing her new business, the problems between her and her husband grew. After a verbal fight with her husband during the eighth year of their marriage, Reem faced severe physical abuse and had to flee to her parents’ house. “Only a few hours after I arrived at my parents’ house bruised and hurt, my brother spoke to my husband and asked him to fetch me. When he arrived, my father calmly asked him not to repeat his actions and that he could discipline me less brutally. My father also reminded me of the importance of absorbing disagreements and problems because his weak heart could not stand having a divorced daughter at home,” she says.

This incident was a sign to Reem that she would not find any support from her family or social circle if she considered divorce. At the same time, her family’s lenient attitude only allowed her husband’s violence to escalate. He began losing control of his temper whenever he got angry, insulting and then beating her severely. Reem repeatedly tried to escape from her husband’s violence and take refuge with her family or friends. Still, she found herself alone, with no one to support her. “Everyone is afraid of divorce. Divorce is a worse hell than violence in our society,” she says.

In the tenth year of her marriage, after a severe beating by her husband, Reem attempted to file a separation lawsuit in court on the grounds of harm. However, the court rejected her claim due to a lack of witnesses, even though a medical report confirmed that Reem had been injured. The judge dismissed the report, arguing that the injury was unrelated to domestic violence. Reem claims that her husband managed to bribe the judge, who rejected her separation lawsuit. At the same time, no one from her family, acquaintances or neighbours agreed to testify on her behalf in court. As a result, Reem lost the case.

Reem grew more afraid of her husband as his violence against her intensified. He prevented her from leaving the house, even going to her shop. She could no longer visit her family or friends. Her husband refused to divorce her and became abusive, forcing her to live with him. Reem became trapped in her home, trying to avoid her husband’s anger in every way possible to find a means of escape. Finally, she decided to reach out to a lawyer for help.

The lawyer advised Reem to file a case for a mukhalaa (consensual) divorce in which she would waive all her rights to the house, alimony, and dowry. However, Reem did not accept this, preferring to remain confined in her husband’s home. “I am now imprisoned in my house,” she says. “When I told my family about my decision, they opposed and attacked me, and my father insisted that he would not take me or my children in if the divorce took place.”

Despite amendments to Syria’s Personal Status Law in 2019, women’s social and economic situation after divorce remains controversial. In Syria, the husband has the final say in a divorce, and no clauses guarantee the wife’s financial rights if she seeks divorce. In the case of Reem, who invested her savings and life’s work to build financial stability with her husband, she is now threatened with losing everything due to her desire to divorce him.

Reem is still in her husband’s house, unable to file a mukhalaa divorce suit to not lose her home, as there is no other place for her and her children to go. In Syria’s current state of corruption, separation lawsuits face discrimination and bias based on connections and bribery. Reem says her husband constantly threatens to bribe the judge if she considers filing a second lawsuit. All this while her husband is supported by their social circle, leaving Reem alone, without family or community support.

Financial Independence Enables Personal Freedoms for Women in Syria

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Miyada is from a village in the Suweida governorate. She got married just before graduating from the Faculty of Engineering in Damascus, but insisted on completing her studies, telling The Syria Report that her “inner voice always pointed to the need for graduating from university.”

A year after her marriage, she gave birth to her first child, then continued her studies, graduated, and got a job in the public sector. By her fifth year of marriage, Miyada had three children.

Though her story seems to paint a picture of an ideal family, the truth is different. Since the first year of her marriage, Miyada has had intense disputes with her husband. He was not violent, but had a hot temper and was prone to extreme reactions, often disregarding Miyada’s opinions.

“My husband saw life from just one perspective,” Miyada says, “that we all have to be alike and have the same needs and feelings. If I or one of my children gets sick, we mustn’t rest. Instead, we must get up and live our life normally because weakness is a flaw. There’s no need for us to do repairs or renovations in the house, even if we are uncomfortable, as the purpose of a house is to provide us with a door that locks and walls that keep us inside.”

After 15 years of marriage and during a holiday with the children, Miyada and her husband had a disagreement. He became agitated and insulted her and her family. “On this day, I felt I could not bear it any longer and that I needed to distance myself,” she said. That day, Miyada did not return home with him, taking her young children to her parents’ house instead. Only her eldest son went home with his father.

“Even though my family saw the insults I was subjected to, and the insults that the family had suffered, they were angry with me when they learned I wanted to divorce him. None of my brothers supported me, only my sister did.”

In 2009, Miyada filed a marital dissolution lawsuit in the Druze Unitarian Court in Suweida, as she was unable to continue married life with her husband at the time. Fortunately, she was able to finalise her divorce.

Afterward, Miyada’s siblings asked her to return to her parents’ house and live in a room allocated for her and her children, known as the muqatiah (“partition”) room. According to Druze customs, the muqatiah room is a room within a house or a small standalone apartment specified in the bequest for the residential use and benefit of an unmarried woman, a widow, or a divorcee. Women are often given the right of usufruct for such rooms in bequests made by their fathers or brothers. In some cases, women are given ownership of these rooms. 

However, Miyada was unhappy with this solution and rented a house in Damascus to live in with her children. Her brothers reluctantly agreed to let her go about her business, particularly because her eldest son, who was then 14 years old, would live with her, hence there would be a “man” there to protect her from people, neighbours, and the streets.

The court granted Miyada alimony from her husband, for herself and her two younger children, amounting to SYP 1,000 per month at that time. “I was fortunate to be working, and that my ex-husband did not just provide the alimony but tried to help us, my children and I, in all ways possible,” she says. “He is now married and has another family, but he has maintained a good relationship with his children.”

Miyada takes pride in the fact that she insisted on completing her studies and finding employment. This allowed her to stick to her decision, to bear the responsibility of her children, and live independently in her own house. These advantages are not afforded to many women who live in similar circumstances.

Testimony: They Barred Samia From her Home

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Born in the 1960s, Sami was the sixth child of parents who worked as farmers in a mountain village in the coastal Tartous governorate. Only one family lived in the village, and the number of houses could be counted on two hands. The residents were all Alawite farmers. 

In the 1970s, some of the villagers who had secondary or, later on, university degrees, were able to find government employment in public sector institutions and ministries, while the rest stayed working in agriculture. 

Samia still remembers the journey each day to the neighbouring village’s school. The area remained somewhat isolated during her childhood. There was no transportation and no paved roads — only groups of children in worn-out shoes, wading through mud and water in the winter.

Samia’s father believed his daughters were entitled to an education, to a certain extent, to secure a better future for them. However, while the older brothers went to a larger city to pursue a university education after receiving their secondary certificates, the daughters stayed in the village “waiting for their fate” and to get married. Over time, all the male siblings married, moved out of the family home and built nearby houses to live in. The daughters also married, living with their husbands in the village. However, their father did not allow Samia to marry before finishing her secondary education, so years passed, and she was left alone with her parents at home.

Through a friend of one of her brothers, Samia managed to find a job in a state institution in Tartous. She was a single, employed woman, caring for and supporting her ageing parents, raising her siblings’ children, and helping her brothers’ wives with their chores. Samia and her married sisters continued working in agriculture on their family’s land.

Samia says that she is satisfied and accepts her path in life, and feels that she was fortunate because her father allowed her to study, enabling her to find a job that supports her independence. Living with her parents and her brothers’ children and grandchildren, surrounded by neighbours, she has redecorated the family home, built a modern kitchen, bought a colour television and added an extra room for hosting relatives and other guests. Her days passed repetitively though with a sense of familiarity and calm as the number of houses and residents in the village grew.

“Daily life obscures the details we’d rather not pay attention to,” Samia says. “My father started to age, and my brothers started having frequent private conversations with him. But I did not want to pay attention.”

The monotony in Samia’s life started to change in the early 2000s as her father, feeling he was nearing the end of his life, decided to give all his properties to his sons. His possessions consisted of a large plot of land, including the family home and the neighbouring homes of his sons. He divided the land and everything on it between his sons and transferred ownership to them. Of course, tradition did not dictate leaving anything to the daughters, including Samia.

“Even though we now live in a village with more than 15 houses, we are still a tribe that works in agriculture,” Sami says. “Women in tribes do not inherit land; the land is for men capable of farming, protecting and preserving it.”

“This is despite the fact that I, my sisters, their daughters, and my brothers’ daughters have devoted our lives to this land, which my educated brothers only get involved with when dividing the annually diminishing harvest.” She adds, “Nevertheless, the brothers have precedence over the land, that’s fine. This is an old custom that applies to all of us. I don’t need the land, but I do need the house.”

“Like any traditional woman in my society, I never contemplated it much or debated it: as long as I live under my father’s protection, what more could I possibly need?” she says. Samia’s father died in early 2012, followed by her mother just a few months later. 

After the mourning period for her mother ended and before the 40-day memorial, Samia’s oldest brother asked her to leave the family home so he could prepare it for his eldest son’s wedding. “Just like that,” Samia says. “No discussion. No argument. And as a ‘favour’ to me, he offered me accommodation in a room attached to his house, which was previously used for storage.”

Samia rejected the offer, preferring not to live in an old room in her brother’s house. Nor did she want to leave the family home where she was born, the one she rebuilt and refurbished. “But I was like someone shouting into a well,” she says. 

Samia asked her brother for financial compensation to help her build her own room on her father’s land. Her brother refused, astonished by the audacity of the proposal. Samia says, “I remember the moment I demanded financial compensation from my brothers. Silence fell upon the room, and astonishment was evident on my eldest brother’s face as if he had seen a ghost. One of my sisters’ husbands tried to ease the situation, delivering a lecture about being a pleasant, contented, traditional woman, and saying that my nerves were just strained due to our parents’ deaths, that this was why I was talking such madness.”

After the meeting, Samia’s oldest brother has her two weeks to leave the family home. 

“In the following days, everyone visited me; all of a sudden, they remembered me, the whole tribe,” Samia says. “Brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, neighbours, relatives near and far. All of them came to ‘fix my situation,’ I, the woman allowed herself to demand an equal share from my brothers in their inheritance. None of them cared that this lone woman was losing her home, her privacy, her security and her future.”

Still, Samia was forced to leave the house in which she was born and lived. “After that, once again, life returned to its monotonous rhythm in the village, as if nothing had happened.”

She refused to live in the room attached to her brother’s house, and instead applied for a loan, guaranteed by her job, and bought a small house in a neighbouring village. She adds: “I am still repaying its installments to this day.”

Explained: Bequests for Druze Women

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Druze women are often limited in their rights to any real estate bequeathed to them through wills, a tendency that appears to be based on cultural customs and norms passed down from previous generations, rather than religious teachings. 

The Druze sect considers bequests to be a duty imposed on every member. Article 307 of Personal Status Law No. 59 of 1953 grants Druze the right to determine some personal status matters, including bequests. For instance, those wishing to bequeath their assets may distribute them as they see fit. 

A Druze sheikh told The Syria Report that women and men are considered equal by the sect, which aims to protect justice for both. For example, a woman receives half of her husband’s property should he divorce her at his own will and without any legitimate justification. In such cases, the man must split everything he owns with his former wife, “even the clothes on his back,” says the sheikh.

In practice, however, this principle is not always followed through. Much of the Druze community includes low-income agricultural workers in parts of Syria already suffering from low and fragmented property ownership. The Suweida governorate, where Syria’s Druze are concentrated, has rugged, mountainous terrain, and its agriculture is rain-fed despite low rainfall.

As a result, families tend to keep a hold of their agricultural properties by bequeathing them only to their male heirs. Socially, bequests to women are seen as ceding properties to other families (i.e. their husbands’ families). Because they are not allocated land in bequests, Druze women, especially in rural areas, have fewer ownership rights. 

In the Druze sect, there are three forms of bequest concerning women’s rights: 

  • The “fully granted” bequest means that a woman has been granted all the rights she is owed on an equal level as the male heirs. 
  • The “Aldirar” bequest indicates that only male heirs were included in the bequest. 
  • The “restricted” bequest grants a woman a specific piece of property, but her rights to dispose of it are restricted. For example, she is given only the right of usufruct for a piece of real estate. 

According to Druze customs, the “muqatiah room” is a room within a house or a small standalone apartment specified in the bequest for the residential use and benefit of an unmarried woman, a widow, or a divorcee. Women are often given the right of usufruct for such rooms in bequests made by their fathers or brothers. In some cases, women are given ownership of these rooms. However, the muqatiah room in the Druze sect is usually criticised as a form of exile or a “waiting room for death.”

Security Services Fabricate Charges to Force the Relinquishment of Inheritance

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A branch of Syria’s security services arrested Ghafran Barakeh, the widow of a former high-level official, on charges that she had collaborated with Israel. However, the security services appear to have fabricated the charges after an inheritance dispute. 

Ms Barakeh, 44 years old, is a Druze woman from the town of Hazar in the countryside of Quneitra governorate. She has three daughters and one son from her late husband, Zeyd Hassoun, who was the governor of Idlib from 1984 to 2000. Hassoun also had several children from a previous marriage that ended in divorce.  

In 2019, after Hassoun’s death, the dispute began over his estate, which consisted of two apartments in Jaramana in Rural Damascus, an apartment in the Al-Mazzeh neighbourhood of Damascus, a restaurant, a car, and agricultural land in Beit Jinn and Hazar, a source close to the family told The Syria Report. 

Mr Hassoun bequeathed the Al-Mazzeh apartment and the farmland in Hazar to Ms Barakeh and their children. He bequeathed the remainder of his estate to his other children. The dispute appears to have centred around the Al-Mazzeh apartment, the highest-value item in Mr Hassoun’s estate, and the Hazar farmland containing 900 grapevines. 

Article 307 of Personal Status Law No. 59 granted the Druze sect the right to regulate some of their own personal status matters, such as bequests. This right allows people to distribute or deprive people of their estates as they see fit. 

In practice, the bequest must be registered as a precondition for its implementation. That is, it becomes legally enforceable only after a court ruling is issued in that regard. Beneficiaries of a bequest must file a court case requesting that they will be registered before the Doctrinal Court of the Unitarian Druze in Suweida or the Second Doctrinal Court in Ashrafieh Saynaya, in Rural Damascus. 

According to the family source, Mr Hassoun’s children from his previous marriage objected to registering the bequest. Should the judge reject registering the will, the principles of Islamic inheritance will be applied instead, meaning all the heirs will share the entire estate. 

However, the arguments and defence of Mr Hassoun’s children from his first wife did not appear to convince the judge. So they turned to security officials in Damascus with whom they reportedly enjoy a good relationship. Those officials intervened to stop the judge at the Court of Cassation from issuing a ruling to register the will. 

Meanwhile, the children of Mr Hassoun’s first wife offered to give Ms Barakeh an apartment in Jaramana instead of the one she was meant to receive in Al-Mazzeh, hoping to settle the dispute. Ms Barakeh rejected the offer. Immediately afterwards, in September 2022, Barakeh received a summons from security services in Damascus, without any charges. 

Then in October, a mediator from the same security service contacted Ms Barakeh to tell her that one of Mr Hassoun’s daughters from his first marriage requested mediation between the two sides to resolve the dispute. He added that he would solve her case with the security services if Ms Barakeh agreed to meet him.  

She agreed to meet with the mediator at the end of October near Jaramana in Rural Damascus. But after the meeting, Ms Barakeh disappeared. A week later, her daughter filed a notice against the mediator and her half-sister to the police, accusing them of kidnapping her mother. It is not yet clear whether the police have launched an investigation. 

Several days ago, Ms Barakeh’s family requested notables, religious leaders and armed faction commanders in Druze-majority Suweida to intervene and mediate on her behalf and find out what had happened to her. After this intervention, the security services decided to detain her on charges of “collaborating with the Israeli enemy.” But the mediators rejected this accusation, stressing that the issue was related to an inheritance dispute and warning that they would escalate if security services continued to detain Ms Barakeh illegally. 

Women Concede HLP Rights When Marrying Into Other Sects

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Women often face discrimination regarding their housing, land, and property rights when they marry men from other religions or sects. This discrimination can sometimes mean forced detention, fabricated charges, and falsified evidence. 

This happened to Marwa, an engineer working with a large construction company before the Syrian uprising in 2011. She is from one of Daraa’s largest, most influential, and wealthiest Sunni families. To avoid rejection from her family, Marwa did not tell them about her marriage to an Alawite classmate. 

Marwa has five sisters and two brothers, who all received a university education. Their father died 15 years ago, and despite many heirs, Marwa received a large share of land and other properties. 

Marwa and her husband supported the 2011 uprising and were active in humanitarian relief work. As a result, Marwa and her husband were arrested. Marwa was detained for two months until her family managed to secure her release by paying a hefty bribe to a high-level security official. However, her husband remained in detention for six months and was immediately conscripted for compulsory military service. 

After her release, Marwa’s family discovered that she was secretly married, marking the beginning of her ordeal. To her family, not only had she committed the unforgivable decision of having married an Alawite, but she had also taken part in revolutionary activities, which they did not see as appropriate for women. The family supported the uprising but saw political activism as a male activity. Political activism in Syria has long carried significant risks, not least of which is political detention and all the physical abuse that entails, including sexual violence, which may, in turn, cause social stigma for female survivors. 

After discovering her marriage, Marwa’s family locked her in an old barn they previously used for livestock in their summer home. However, the family did not stand unified against her. Marwa’s mother and older brother sided against her, while her sisters and younger brother advocated on her behalf. Still, the mother and older brother’s stance won out. 

After 20 days in the barn, Marwa’s brother offered her a deal that he saw as a way to cleanse her of her shame. He would release her in exchange for marrying a man he deemed appropriate and relinquishing all her properties. He threatened to keep her locked in the barn for the remainder of her life if she refused and dispose of her properties how he deemed fit, whether she liked it or not. 

Marwa was coerced into accepting the offer, including relinquishing her properties via a sales and purchase contract with her brother. She also married a man chosen by her brother. The marriage was conducted under a customary marriage contract and was not formally registered with the Personal Status Directorate.

After living in different parts of the Daraa governorate and fleeing various battles between opposition and regime forces, Marwa and her husband fled again to Jordan and then to Europe. After obtaining residency there, Marwa broke up with her husband but could not regain her properties. 

A similar story happened to Abir, an Alawite woman from Lattakia governorate who married a Sunni man while studying at the University of Aleppo. Her family rejected the marriage. Pressured by her husband’s conservative family, she began wearing the hijab, increasing her parents’ negative stance towards the union. Her family consequently shunned her. 

Nevertheless, Abir finished her studies and had three children. 

During the fighting in Aleppo, Abir’s husband was killed by a shell, and bombs destroyed their home. She decided to return to Lattakia and start over and reach out to her family for support. However, her family refused to provide any help. 

Abeer’s father had not distributed his properties to his children before his death, so according to the Personal Status Law, Abir should receive an inheritance alongside her sisters. The inheritance was extensive and included a house, an ocean villa, and agricultural land in their village, all of which remained in her father’s name without having conducted a legal inheritance inventory. Abir’s family refused to let her receive any share because she had married a man from a different sect. 

When Abir filed a lawsuit to proceed with an inheritance inventory, the family launched a campaign to tarnish her reputation, accusing her of mental illness and even forging her signature on a sales contract for her share. Finally, when Abir did not relent, they wrote a false security report against her son, now a young man, which led to a one-month detainment. The unlawful imprisonment of her son led Abir to withdraw her lawsuit and waive her rights.

Women in Syria are Coerced into Relinquishing Their Properties

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In an apparent violation of women’s housing, land, and property rights, some Syrian women are compelled to relinquish their properties after experiencing psychological and physical threats. 

Afraa, a woman in her 40s, is an employee at a government educational institution. She previously lived in her father’s two-storey house, surrounded by half a hectare of land in a village in the northern part of the Lattakia governorate. 

In 2012, Afraa’s mother died, and her father, who is paralysed, has remained bed-bound since. Afraa was the only one of her siblings to care for her father throughout his illness until his recent death. 

Before he passed, and as an expression of gratitude, Afraa’s father gave her the house and the surrounding land without her siblings knowing. He gave his other children a house he owned in Lattakia city and some agricultural land. 

When Afraa’s siblings discovered her inheritance, they accused her of having manipulated their ill father to take over the family’s village home. Afraa’s older brother moved into the house against her will. He demanded that she relinquish her ownership of the house in exchange for being allowed the right to use the home for the remainder of her life. When Afraa refused, her brother allegedly locked her in a toolshed, prevented her from going to work, and confiscated her cell phone. Afraa says she was beaten during this time and often deprived of food. 

Afraa’s unusual absence from work concerned her colleagues. They reportedly asked about her and visited the village, though her brother claimed not to know where she was. After a month, a colleague reported Afraa’s disappearance to the police and filed a complaint against her brother. The police raided the brother’s home in Lattakia city and the village home, where they found Afraa in the toolshed bearing signs of physical violence. 

Afraa did not file a complaint against her brother, citing her fear of him. She subsequently relinquished her home ownership to him in exchange for lifetime rights of usufruct over the house. 

Samia, a woman in her 40s, tells a similar story. She is from a rural part of the Hama governorate and is married to an army officer, with whom she has three daughters. In 2012, Samia’s husband registered the home in her name in case he died in the war and in order to prevent his brothers from becoming his heirs. 

After Samia’s husband returned from his service, he married another woman in order to have a son and, therefore, a male heir. He requested that Samia transfer ownership of the house to him.

Samia’s husband tried to pressure her socially, sending a religious cleric to convince her of the husband’s supposed right to reclaim ownership of the house. According to Samia, her husband won the support of their community, as it is not uncommon in their part of Syria for husbands to hand over homes to their wives. Indeed, she says, many extended family members encouraged him to reclaim the house, marry a second woman, and have a son who could “bear his name”. 

Samia tried persuading her husband to build an additional storey on the house so that he could live there with his new wife on the condition that the original house remain with her and the girls. The new addition would, however, violate the construction code. 

He refused Samia’s solution and escalated the conflict by allegedly physically abusing Samia and her daughters. Samia became especially afraid because her husband kept guns, automatic weapons, and grenades in his room, she said. At one point, he locked her and the girls in a room and allegedly threatened to throw a grenade at them. When a lawyer handed over a sales contract for the house, Samia felt she had no choice but to sign it.

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