property_extortion – Syria Report

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NDF Extorts Real Estate in Homs’ Al-Zahraa Neighbourhood

24-01-2023/in HLP, News /by Rand Shamaa

When the Syrian revolution began in 2011, most residents of Al-Zahraa neighbourhood in Homs sided with the regime, many even joining the National Defence Forces (NDF), a pro-government militia. The NDF subsequently made Al-Zahraa into a base for attacks on surrounding pro-opposition neighbourhoods such as Al-Bayadeh and Karam Al-Zeitoun, and harassed residents of Al-Zahraa, seizing many displaced people’s homes.

Situated in the eastern part of Homs, Al-Zahraa is an informal settlement which was built in the 1970s on agricultural land not meant for construction. A sizable minority of Sunni Bedouin clans historically from the area live in the neighbourhood, alongside an Alawite majority originally hailing from rural parts of the Homs governorate. Most Alawite residents of Al-Zahraa are low-income employees and workers in state institutions, as well as the security and military services.

The neighbourhood saw a blossoming leftist movement in the 1980s. It served as a hiding spot for members of the League of Communist Action (LCA) who were wanted by the security authorities. The LCA is a communist anti-regime movement active in the 1980s, whose members were primarily members of religious minorities, university students and members of the armed forces. Many members were subject to reprisals by the security services, torture and years of imprisonment.

Like most informal settlements in Syria, Al-Zahraa suffered from poor government services such as electricity, water, sewage, municipal services and healthcare. That began to change in 2011 as construction work picked up, spurred by NDF members who had become wealthy by looting the surrounding neighbourhoods. The government started to pay more attention to Al-Zahraa in response to the loyalty presented by its residents. Roads were paved, and transportation became better organised.

In December 2012, four Alawite female nurses were murdered, and their bodies were thrown in Al-Zahraa’s main public square. The NDF massacred 40 Sunni residents in retaliation. Remaining Sunni residents, as well as pro-opposition Alawite residents, subsequently fled the neighbourhood. The NDF was then able to extort the empty homes. Property extortion is the seizure of someone else’s property without their consent or legal basis for ownership or legitimate reason.

Souad, who comes from a Sunni family, lived at home with her mother when the revolution broke out. Their house was unlicensed and constructed by her father several decades previously. Though Souad’s father was already deceased at the time, he had been a volunteer in the Syrian army and old friends and colleagues surrounded their home from his army days. Fearing sectarian violence, Souad and her mother fled the house during the war. The NDF soon seized it. In 2015, she turned to the police for help recovering the home but later preferred to sell it at a lower price and live elsewhere.

Such harassment did not only target Sunni residents of the neighbourhood, but also Alawites who opposed the regime. Saeed, an Alawite man in his 40s, left his home in Al-Zahraa due to a dispute with NDF members after the 2012 massacre. Because of Saeed’s stance against revenge killings, people threw stones at his house. Fearing things could worsen, he left his home and rented a house in a nearby neighbourhood. Shortly afterward, the NDF allowed the family of one of its fallen fighters to reside in Saeed’s house.

Saeed managed to visit his house several times after the fighting ended in 2014 and asked the family living there to leave, to no avail, he told The Syria Report. It was only after he filed a complaint to the police, complete with documents proving his ownership of the house, that he could get it back. Because there are no proper title deeds for houses in informal settlements, ownership documents usually include notarised purchase contracts for agricultural land or shares and any available electricity, water and phone bills.

The property violations have even affected members of the NDF. Ali, who came from a Bedouin clan in Al-Zahraa, was affiliated with the NDF but was killed in a personal dispute with other Bedouin residents in 2013. His family received threats after the incident, telling them to leave the neighbourhood. They did so, moving to another part of Homs, and another NDF-affiliated family settled in their empty house.

In at least one case, an NDF officer on duty was also targeted. In 2014, security forces carried out a series of arrests on NDF members in Al-Zahraa, on numerous charges, including drug trafficking, theft, gang membership and kidnapping for ransom. The family of one of those arrested turned to an Alawite officer from Al-Zahraa to mediate for their son’s release. Because the officer refused to mediate, he was subject to intimidation tactics, including a bomb thrown at his home. In the end, he decided to flee the neighbourhood.

AANES Occupies Absentee Properties for Free and via Forced Tenancy

17-01-2023/in HLP, News /by Rand Shamaa

Recent years have seen the majority-Kurdish Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES) authorities seize many absentee-owned properties. When those absentees return home and demand their properties back, authorities have offered to lease them, without any compensation for the previous occupancy period.

Seizure of absentees’ real estate is a form of property extortion without the owners’ consent or knowledge, and without any legal ownership title or legitimate reason to do so.

Various entities within the AANES have taken possession of empty or absentee-owned real estate, including buildings, shops and homes. Most of the absentees are expatriates originally from the area whose properties have been seized by the AANES without their approval–sometimes without any notification. Many of these absentees were forced to return either permanently or temporarily, or appoint someone on their behalf, in order to sue the various AANES entities that had seized their properties. In most cases, they were able to reach a contractual agreement where the property-seizing entity would pay a monthly or annual rent. These contracts preserve the rights of the lessors and include terms on the time period for the lease, the eviction period and conditions to not modify the property.

A correspondent for The Syria Report spoke with K. R., who appointed a lawyer via a power of attorney through the Syrian Embassy in Sweden to recover a property she owns in Qamishli that the AANES’ Union of Engineers took to use as their headquarters in 2018. When K. R. requested that the union vacate the property, they instead offered for her to rent it and even drew up a lease contract. The lawyer rejected this offer, explaining that his client feared losing her property after four years of occupancy without compensation. The union ended up vacating the property in late 2022 without paying any compensation to K. R. for the years it had occupied the space.

However, the process isn’t always so simple. The Committee for Protecting Religions, which is affiliated with the AANES, occupied the home of Mr Al-Khatouni in the Al-Wasta neighbourhood of Qamishli without informing him. Mr Khatouni, who lives abroad, appointed his brother to recover the house. The committee agreed to vacate the property but requested a payment equal to the value of the improvements it had made to the home. Khatouni agreed to pay, but the committee returned and bargained over taking the water tanks and other equipment that they had installed, despite the fact that the payment included those items. When Mr Khatouni refused, the committee decided not to vacate the home and stayed on without paying rent.

AANES courts do not hear civil real estate disputes for zoned areas until after the Department of Real Estate Complaints (part of the Categories Union) has heard and mediated such cases for reconciliation between the two sides. The Categories Union is an AANES organisation aimed at regulating market professions. Should efforts at mediation fail, then the Department of Real Estate Complaints sends a report to a court called the Justice Diwan to settle the dispute.

Meanwhile, the AANES’ Committee for Protecting Absentee Syriac and Assyrian Properties began a new policy in early 2022 to collect rental payments from AANES institutions that have occupied Christian-owned properties in the cities of Qamishli, Deirik and Al-Qahtaniyeh in the Hassakeh governorate. In most cases, the committee negotiates with these AANES bodies without the authorisation or knowledge of the actual property owners. According to The Syria Report’s local correspondent, the committee takes a 35 percent cut of the occupants’ rental payments for itself, giving the remainder to the property owner. It is unclear what happens in cases where the property owner is deceased or has no heirs.

The AANES formed the Committee for Protecting Absentee Syriac and Assyrian Properties in 2014 as a civil body to intervene before AANES courts in disputes involving absentee Christians. The committee considers complaints about extortion or occupation of absentees’ properties, as well as requests by tenants of these properties related to rental payments, vacancies and eviction.

For example, the AANES’ Logistics Commission has occupied a building owned by A. Gh., an absentee, without payments since 2015. In October 2022, the Committee for Protecting Absentee Properties informed the Logistics Commission that it needed to either vacate the property or enter into a formal contract with payments calculated according to the property’s current market value. The two sides managed to reach an agreement and made a contract. However, A. Gh. had not appointed the committee to negotiate on his behalf or to lease out his property. In cases like this, any dispute or complaint from the original property owner about the contract must be directed to the committee, which drew up the lease agreement on their behalf.

SNA Seize Properties of Residents Loyal to AANES in Tal Abyad

13-12-2022/in HLP, News /by Rand Shamaa

Since pro-opposition Syrian National Army factions seized Tal Abyad and its surrounding countryside along the Syrian-Turkish border in 2019, many Kurdish residents were forced to flee the area. They ended up in areas controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the Raqqa and Hassakeh governorates.

In their wake, SNA factions seized the properties of now-absent Kurdish residents working for the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES) and the SDF. They have also taken properties belonging to displaced Arabs and Turkmen loyal to AANES.

Tal Abyad is located in the Raqqa governorate and sits along the Syrian-Turkish border. The city was established in the early 1900s and became a destination for Armenians fleeing the genocide in Turkey. Before 2011, Tal Abyad was home to around 120,000 people, including Arabs from various tribes and Kurds, Turkmen, and Armenians. Tal Abyad residents work mainly in agriculture and trade.

The city has also been known for its role in smuggling networks between Syria and Turkey. The Syrian government included the city in the provisions of Decree No. 41 of 2004, which regulates real estate ownership along the border. Under this decree and its amendments, people must obtain security approval before any legal disposal of their property in such areas. The Minister of Interior issues the approval based on a proposal from the Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform and the Ministry of Defence.

After intense battles with the Islamic State, the SDF captured Tal Abyad and the surrounding countryside in 2014 and maintained control of the border strip until October 2019, when the Turkish-backed SNA took the area during Operation Euphrates Shield. The operation aimed to remove SDF from a 30-kilometre belt of territory along the Syrian side of the border.

Sheikh Hammad Al-Hammoud, a notable from one of the Arab tribes in Tal Abyad, told The Syria Report that he was displaced from the area during Operation Euphrates Shield. After he left in 2019, the SNA seized 100 hectares of his agricultural land in the village of Al-Ali Bajlih outside Tal Abyad under the pretext that he was loyal to AANES.

Sheikh Al-Hammoud worked in agriculture and trade before 2011, but his favourable reputation and success in mediating disputes between residents landed him an appointment as a member of the AANES reconciliation office during its control of Tal Abyad from 2014 to 2019. The office is an official entity that aims to solve disputes amicably before reaching the court.

According to Al-Hammoud, a group from the Ahrar Al-Sharqiyeh faction, which is part of the SNA, seized his land before the 2020 wheat harvest season without any prior warning or official charges against him, and without filing any actual case in court.

Seizing someone else’s property without consent and a legal ownership deed or legitimate reason is considered extortion. No act of force needs to have occurred for a seizure to be classified as extortion.

Such seizures did not stop at the properties of employees of the AANES and its military and security institutions. They also extended to their families and relatives.

AbdelMonaem is from the village of Sheriaan, south of Tal Abyad, and works as a traffic police officer for the AANES’ Asayish security forces. He was also displaced to Raqqa after Operation Euphrates Shield. According to AbdelMonaem, a group from the SNA-aligned Jabhat Al-Shamiyeh faction seized his 60-hectare agricultural land near the Al-Jallab River. However, the land is still registered in the name of AbdelMonaem’s father, who died in 2017. The heirs have not yet conducted the inheritance proceedings, so there are, in effect, multiple co-owners of the land, including seven sons and six daughters.

Jabhat Al-Shamiyeh expelled AbdelMonaem’s brothers from the land just before the wheat and barley harvest in 2020, he says, under the pretext that he works with the Asayish. His family members paid the price.

Meanwhile, Issa AbdulAziz is a Turkmen sheikh from the Al-Toubal clan who hails from the village of Hammam Al-Turkmen outside Tal Abyad. He was a political detainee in Syrian regime prisons from 1984 to 1996, charged with loyalty to the Iraqi Baath Party. Currently, AbdulAziz is a member of the Syrian Future Party, which supports AANES.

AbdulAziz told The Syria Report that a group from Ahrar Al-Sharqiyeh seized 40 hectares of his family’s land before the 2020 wheat harvest season under the pretext that he works with the SDF. His 83-year-old mother went to Ahrar Al-Sharqiyeh’s headquarters in the area with documents proving that she and her husband, not AbdulAziz, owned the land. The faction referred her to court but without any luck. One Ahrar Al-Sharqiyeh leader reportedly told her: “When your son returns, the land will return to you.” Members of the faction are still cultivating the farmland.

Meanwhile, AbdulRahman Al-Mohammad, who is from the village of Al-Jurn Al-Aswad outside Tal Abyad, bought three hectares of land from his neighbour in 2014. Due to the trust between the neighbours and because the local Cadastral Affairs directorates were not operating in the area during that period, Al-Mohammad did not formally register the purchase. The land’s previous owner was then displaced from the area during Operation Euphrates Shield.

A group from Ahrar Al-Sharqiyeh seized the land by force in 2020 on the pretext that the owner was pro-regime. AbdulRahman could not convince the faction that he, not his former neighbour, was the land’s current owner. He was also unable to document his ownership of the property in the Land Registry. Repeated harassment by Ahrar Al-Sharqiyeh pushed AbdulRahman to flee to Raqqa.

Iran-Affiliated Brigade Refuses to Return Homes in East Aleppo to Original Owners

11-10-2022/in HLP, News /by Rand Shamaa

Many returnees to the eastern neighbourhoods of Aleppo city could not recover their homes, which were occupied during their absence by families who had been displaced from the Idlib governorate towns of Kafraya and Al-Fuaa. The Al-Baqir Brigade, a militia loyal to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, controls some neighbourhoods in east Aleppo and has refused to return the occupied properties to their original owners.

Some displaced homeowners who have returned to the east Aleppo neighbourhoods of Al-Marjeh, Al-Maadi, Al-Saliheen, Bab Al-Neirab, and Al-Fardous have filed lawsuits before the civil courts in the city to evict the current occupants. They have also unsuccessfully attempted to mediate with the head of the Al-Baqir Brigade, Khaled Al-Marai, a sheikh from the Al-Bakareh tribe.

Residents from Kafraya and Al-Fuaa, two Shia-majority towns, mostly remained politically loyal to the Syrian regime. They were forcibly displaced from their homes in several stages, the last of which was in July 2018. Their expulsion was part of the so-called Four Towns Agreement, the IRGC, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, and the Islamist Ahrar Al-Sham group negotiated in April 2017 in Doha, Qatar. The agreement stipulated the simultaneous expulsion of residents from several besieged towns, including Madaya and Al-Zabadani in the Rural Damascus governorate and Kafraya and Al-Fuaa in Idlib.

More than 40,000 Kafraya and Al-Fuaa residents were displaced from their homes and sent to live in displacement shelters in regime-held areas. From there, the Al-Baqir Brigade transferred around 2,000 families to the areas it controls in east Aleppo, allowing them to occupy the vacant homes of displaced residents from those neighbourhoods.

The homes in east Aleppo are owned by displaced people who fled the fighting between 2012 to 2016 or by pro-opposition residents who were forcibly displaced, most of whom are Sunni Muslims. The latter group were expelled during the regime’s final attack on east Aleppo in late 2016 and sent to opposition-controlled areas of rural northern Aleppo governorate. Most of the people now returning home to east Aleppo are from the first group, as forcibly displaced residents must obtain security approval to return.

Meanwhile, the Al-Baqir Brigade has done restoration work on some homes and apartments damaged by previous fighting and regime bombing in the area during opposition control in 2012-16. Namely, the brigade made the houses it worked on habitable, with repaired water and electrical networks. The homes were also provided with furniture by the Aleppo Defenders Corps, another pro-IRGC militia, to house the displaced people from Kafraya and Al-Fuaa properly.

One displaced resident who tried returning home to the Al-Marjeh neighbourhood told The Syria Report that members of the Al-Baqir Brigade prevented him from visiting his house, which a family from Al-Fuaa now occupies. He added that a group of homeowners communicated with the Al-Baqir Brigade leadership in the Al-Balloureh neighbourhood to mediate their return and evict the current occupants, but the commanders rejected their pleas.

The returnee said he is now living in a rented home in the same neighbourhood as his house. Another displaced person from east Aleppo told The Syria Report that he had filed a complaint to the court, which subsequently issued a ruling evicting the occupants from his home. However, he said the ruling has yet to be executed and that a group affiliated with the Al-Baqir Brigade threatened him with physical harm or detainment if he continued pursuing the eviction.

Officials from Al-Baqir Brigade suggested that if alternative housing units are made available for the Kafraya and Al-Fuaa families, the homes in east Aleppo will return to the original owners. However, according to The Syria Report’s correspondent, the officials implied that the returning homeowners would, in this case, have to pay the costs of restoring their houses.

Meanwhile, a source in Aleppo’s Directorate of Endowments told The Syria Report that the Iranian government is equipping residential buildings on endowment properties in the Jibb Al-Jalabi neighbourhood of east Aleppo. The source added that the Kafraya and Al-Fuaa families would move to those homes under long-term rental contracts. Iran built numerous residential facilities in Jibb Al-Jalabi in 2020 and 2021. The country also set up a consulate nearby, in the same area.

Opposition Vows to Return Seized Properties in Northern Aleppo

11-10-2022/in HLP, News /by Rand Shamaa

Under the pretext of security and military needs, an armed opposition group seized civilian-owned farms and homes in the city of Al-Bab in northern Aleppo in 2017. Five years later, the original owners have been unable to recover their properties.

The group that seized the properties is led by a man named Fadi Al-Saleh, also known as Fadi Al-Deiri, and has been allied with various Syrian National Army (SNA) factions. Most group members were forcibly displaced from Homs and its countryside to northern Syria, where Al-Bab is located.

Currently, the group is known as the Bayazeid Brigade. It is affiliated with the Sultan Malakshah Division, a part of the Turkish-backed SNA’s Second Corps that controls the Euphrates Shield area of the northern Aleppo governorate. Previously, the group had been affiliated with the Sultan Murad Division before splitting in 2020.

In 2017, the Bayazeid fighters extorted 25 farms and houses in Al-Bab. They claimed the properties belonged to regime loyalists and absentees who no longer lived in the area. Afterwards, the group made the properties into its headquarters and refused to return them to their owners, claiming they were strategically located and overlooked regime territory.

Most recently, on September 29, 2022, the Hayat Thaeroon, a component of the SNA in Al-Bab, reached an agreement with the owners of the 25 extorted properties. Under this agreement, the homes and farms must be handed over to their owners within a six-month deadline. Thaeroon would be given priority if the owners decided to sell their properties in the future. However, the agreement, made in the presence of Al-Bab Revolutionary Council representatives and local notables, did not include signed approval by representatives of the Bayazeid Brigade or the affiliated Sultan Malakshah Division.

Thaeroon is a group of several SNA factions and is meant to serve as a unified military body for northern Syria. It works on various opposition-related issues in the area, such as settling disputes and restoring certain rights.

Under last month’s agreement, which The Syria Report reviewed, Thaeroon promised to return the extorted homes and farms to their owners by the end of the six months.

The owners of the 25 extorted properties organised a protest in Al-Bab on September 23, demanding that their homes and farms be returned. In a statement released after the demonstration, some owners said they had received death threats from Fadi Al-Deiri.

According to The Syria Report’s correspondent in the area, the property owners have received multiple offers from Al-Deiri via intermediaries to sell their homes and farms. They rejected the proposals, insisting instead on recovering the properties instead.

Previously, in 2019, the property owners turned to the SNA General Command’s Security Establishment in Al-Bab, when Fadi Al-Deiri’s group was a part of the Sultan Murad Division. Some owners obtained a letter from the Security Establishment directing Sultan Murad to vacate the properties. However, the properties remained occupied and the Security Establishment ceased to exist in 2020.

Other attempts to seek mediation from SNA leaders failed, despite SNA commanders, such as Second Corps leader Muhammad Al-Baz, pledging in 2020 to return the extorted properties to their owners.