Assad plans to seize property from millions of exiled, displaced Syrian Sunnis

There is no reason to believe that the Assad regime would make it easy for Sunni refugees to come back to Syria, but even if they did, both the refugees and the internally displaced persons would find little but ruins where their homes used to stand – or where towns’ and villages’ government buildings used to stand.

Western intelligence services say that during the 7-year war, Assad’s military – and its Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah’s allies – made no more than a token effort to fight ISIS. The overwhelming emphasis in the military campaign conducted by Assad and his allies was on destroying the infrastructure of Sunni existence in Syria. The war against the Sunnis escalated in the fall of 2015, when Russian forces joined the fray. Most of Russia’s air campaign – upward of 90 percent of Russia air bombings — targeted power stations, water treatment facilities, hospitals and clinics, schools, and markets in Sunni areas, with the goal of making life so unbearable for Syrian Sunnis that they would flee Syria or move out of towns in north and west Syria, thus enlarging the areas in west Syria under Alawite control.

The SZ and RP, citing UN experts, note that Assad’s decree would affect those owning apartments, buildings, and land plots, and especially Syria’s business-oriented middle tier. This would serve Assad’s goal by preventing the Sunni middle class — professionals, and the more educated and well-off among the Sunnis — from re-establishing themselves in an Alawite-controlled Syria.

Citing the World Bank, the RP said most exiled Syrians would not be able to present written proof because land registries only once covered half of Syria. Furthermore, many official title listings, for example in Homs and Aleppo, had since been destroyed.

It is also unlikely that the more than five million Syrians who fled abroad and the further six million displaced within Syria by seven years of warfare have been carrying property deeds with them.

SD also notes this: Showing up with documents or handing a relative a warrant of attorney, as the decree stipulates, may well prove fatal: The Assad regime has designated 1.5 million Sunni Syrians as “terrorists,” and the regime’s secret services have been looking for them.

The German Foreign Ministry announced Friday that it was “deeply angered” by Assad’s latest decree because it amounted to property dispossession of Syrian refugees “on a great scale.”

The Foreign Ministry said it regarded the Assad regime’s decree as a “specious” attempt to put Syrians’ property rights into question.

The new law was an apparent attempt to fundamentally modify local conditions “to the benefit of the regime and its supporters and hinder the return of a huge number of Syrians,” the Foreign Ministry added.

According to the Rheinische Post, Assad’s decree was viewed by Syria’s opposition groups essentially the last step in the regime’s “ethnic cleansing” campaign.

Those who started the rebellion against Assad in 2011 were Sunnis inspired by the Arab Spring. To reduce the influence of Sunnis in Syria, the Assad regime killed about 420,000 Sunni civilians (the war’s 500,000 death toll includes about 80,000 combatants on all sides), and systematically destroyed the infrastructure of Sunni towns, villages, and neighborhoods, forcing more than 11 million Sunnis out of their homes.

The regime was especially keen on evicting Sunnis from economic hubs such as Damascus, Homs, Aleppo, and the Mediterranean coast.

The Assad regime, staffed by members of the Alawite minority, presented itself as a champion of other minorities in Syria — Christians, Druze, Shiites, and Ismailis – and followed a war plan which would considerably increase the areas in Syria largely cleansed of Sunni presence.

On 20 August 2017, following a campaign to evict anti-regime rebels and Sunni civilians from areas east of Damascus, Assad gave a speech in which he openly outlined a regime strategy aiming to create a “healthy and homogenous society.”

Assad said:

It’s true that we lost the best of our young men as well as our infrastructure, [built] at great cost and through the hard toil of generations, but in return we earned a healthier, more homogeneous society – in a literal sense, and not as flowery words or lip service. This homogeneity is the basis for national unity – homogeneity in beliefs, ideology, traditions, customs, perceptions and outlook, despite the fact that they are diverse and multifaceted. Homogeneity doesn’t mean complete identity, but rather mutual complementation that creates a single national hue. This hue is the basis for national unity that unifies all members of the one homeland.

The Rheinische Post says that Assad’s planned mass dispossession would also enable him to “fill empty coffers and reward loyal supporters with construction contracts.”

“Many of the potentially affected land plots are in attractive locations of the three largest Syrian cities Damascus, Aleppo and Homs, which comprise the nation’s economic backbone,” the RP says.

Bijan Djir-Sarai, Foreign Affairs Spokesman for the opposition liberal Free Democrats (FDP) in the German parliament, told the Rheinische Post that “many” exiled Syrians, after the Assad regime takes possession of their properties, would be left with no incentive to return to Syria.