On August 11, 2022, the Damascus governorate announced that its real estate appraisal committee had completed work at the northern entrance of Damascus. 

Appraisal committees appraise real estate properties of a to-be-zoned area based on the value of these properties before the issuance of the zoning decree.

Decree No. 237 of 2021 stipulated the creation of a zoned real estate area at the capital city’s northern entrance. The governorate would develop the project in accordance with Law No. 10 of 2018, which allowed for the creation of one or more such areas within the General Zoning Plan of an administrative unit. Decree No. 237 was based on Detailed Zoning Plan No. 104 for the Qaboun Industrial Zone, which was issued and approved in June 2019. This zoned real estate area takes up 200 hectares of land that mainly include the industrial area, in addition to a 50-hectare section carved out of the neighbouring city of Harasta, which had been a part of the Rural Damascus governorate. 

Law No. 10 of 2018 and Decree No. 66 of 2012 stipulated the creation of several specialised committees that would carry out different tasks after establishing zoned real estate areas. Among those committees is the real estate appraisal committees, which must appraise the real estate of the area according to its current state – that is, the state the properties were in before the issuance of the zoning decree. The committee’s appraisal includes any buildings, facilities, trees or crops. The appraisal occurs in a “just” manner that “takes real values into account” to later compensate the owners with shares inside the zoned real estate area. 

The Real Estate Appraisal Committee for the Northern Entrance to Damascus zone was formed in March 2022, by the decision of the Damascus governor. Per Decree No. 66 and Law No. 10, the body has five members, headed by a judge with the rank of a counsellor, appointed by the Minister of Justice. The other four members include two real estate experts appointed by the Minister of Public Works and Housing and two experts to serve as representatives of real estate owners in the zone who those owners elected.  

Under Decree No. 66 and Law No. 10, the committee takes the following factors into account during the appraisal process: location of the land and any buildings on it, as well as facilities and connection to surrounding buildings; availability of public utilities; adherence to construction codes; the type of trees and crops (if farmland), as well as location, nature, classification, products and proximity to roads, public utilities and the city centre, and finally the sources of irrigation. 

After it finished appraising properties in the Northern Entrance to Damascus zone, the committee called upon real estate owners to review its appraisal of their properties. 

Decree No. 66 and Law No. 10 dictate that the table must include the committee’s appraisal of the land, buildings, trees, crops and other facilities, each with its data field. In reality, however, the table included the following fields: real estate number, real estate zone, plot number, storey, surface area, value per square metre of floor space, land value, and the total adjusted value of the buildings and land, accounting for various weight criteria. The committee did not clarify what these criteria were.  

According to the head of the Committee of Qaboun Industrialists, the value per square metre of basement floor space was appraised at SYP 1.5 million; the first-storey floor space at SYP 4 million; and second-storey floor space at SYP 2.5 million. 

The committee’s decisions may be appealed before the governorate’s Civil Court of Appeals, though the subsequent ruling is considered final. According to Article 14 of Law No. 10, the Civil Court of Appeals must decide on such cases within 30 days. Appeals do not halt the zoning implementation process. 

Article 13 of Law No. 10 states that when the Real Estate Appraisal Committee completes its task, then the Distribution Committee estimates the values of the area’s zoning plots. It then compares the total value of all the real estate properties there, as reported by the appraisal committee, with the total value of the zoning plots. Afterwards, equity shares are distributed to the rights holders. 

An unchecked proliferation of weapons in Syria, as well as the few means of prevention or social protection for women, has resulted in some husbands using physical threats to force their wives into relinquishing their properties.

Khuloud is in her mid-50s and lives in the countryside of the Tartous governorate. Her husband Riyad is a volunteer in the pro-regime National Defence Forces. Early on in the couple’s marriage, 20 years ago, Riyad discovered that he was infertile. In response, and as a gesture of kindness to his wife, he officially registered their home in Khuloud’s name in the Land Registry. However, with time, tensions developed between the two, resulting in domestic violence. Khuloud says Riyad beat her regularly, which eventually pushed her to file for divorce. Doing so put her life and the lives of her family members in danger.

Riyad said that he would only formally agree to the divorce if Khuloud returned the house to his ownership, she says. However, when she refused, he allegedly threatened her with a handgun. Days later, unknown gunmen opened fire on Khuloud’s family’s home. That night, she says, armed men knocked on Khuloud’s door while her husband was away, telling her to heed her husband’s demand for ownership of the house.

“It’s like I’m in the desert – no neighbours, no police, no evidence that there is a state,” Khuloud tells The Syria Report. She comes from a family with modest means and without any high-ranking relatives in the military or security services who she could turn to. On the other hand, she says her husband’s relationships with security personnel allow him to act essentially free of consequences.

People throughout regime-controlled areas of Syria say that they feel unsafe due to the unchecked proliferation of weapons, particularly among members of the security services or pro-regime militias. Simple disputes run the risk of becoming violent shootouts. Faced with this danger, Khuloud’s family persuaded her to relinquish the house she owned to her husband to protect herself and them. She acquiesced, giving him the ownership of the house in exchange for divorce.

In contrast, Hasna, a 35-year-old woman from coastal Syria, decided to keep her home. Her husband, Radwan, who also hails from the Syrian coast, is affiliated with Air Force Intelligence and works in one of the country’s civilian airports, Hasna says. Because of the Air Force Intelligence’s control over airport security, Radwan was able to accumulate a sizable fortune, eventually investing a portion of his money in real estate.

Through her own work as a hair stylist, Hasna was also able to save some money and make a down payment on a modest home in the Al-Tadhamon district of Damascus. She later finished paying for the house with the help of a bank loan.

Disagreements escalated between Hasna and her husband, with Radwan reportedly threatening her on multiple occasions with various types of guns and knives to persuade her to give up the house. On one occasion, she says he threatened her with a military-grade weapon and followed her when she ran outside to seek safety among her neighbours. Another time, he woke her up with a gun pointed at her head, she added.

Hasna filed a lawsuit against Radwan before the court. Thanks to a high-ranking state-employed relative of hers, Hasna’s case was expedited and she was granted the divorce and a restraining order against Radwan. Still, Hasna says she remained afraid of him, and eventually sold the house to move to a different area altogether.

Throughout June and July, the government-run General Secretariat of the Idlib governorate offered rural farmlands owned by absentees and forcibly displaced residents for auction.

The recent auctions, an imitation of similar auctions regularly organised by the Hama governorate since four years ago, are the first to be held by the Idlib governorate, and included lands cultivated with pistachios. The lands offered this summer included farms in all regime-held parts of Idlib governorate, except for the towns of Al-Ghadfeh, Maarshourein and Maasran, which the regime still administers as closed military zones. Notably, the recent auctions also included pistachio farms in the Al-Tamanaeh district, which belongs administratively to the Idlib governorate, though the Hama governorate had been in charge of auctioning lands there in previous auctions.

Opposition forces took control of the entire Idlib governorate in 2015 but were forced out of the governorate’s southern and eastern countryside by regime military advances in 2019 and 2020. At the time, regime forces managed to regain control of Khan Sheikhoun, Maaret Al-Numan and Saraqeb. Most owners of the lands recently offered for investment in the auctions were forcibly displaced by the fighting to areas that remain under opposition control.

On May 31, 2022, the General Secretariat of the Idlib governorate issued Announcement No. 580, identifying the dozens of towns and cities in rural Idlib where farmlands would become available for investment through the auctions. The secretariat announced 12 dates for the public auctions, all of which would be held in the first half of June 2022 inside a tent erected in the “temporary” Idlib governorate capital of Khan Sheikhoun. Damascus has governed Khan Sheikhoun as the Idlib governorate’s provisional administrative centre since late 2021.

The May 31 announcement specified that the investment period for the auctioned lands would last for one agricultural season. The initial deposit values would be SYP 700,000 per hectare of land, with the final deposits at ten percent of the “referral” value – that is, the initial offering price of the auctioned land. According to the announcement, each potential investor interested in participating in the auctions was required to pay SYP 35,000 to obtain the technical book of conditions from the General Secretariat’s Department of Contracts and to submit one application per real estate area for which they hoped to place a bid.

Following the first round of auctions in June, the General Secretariat organised a new auction for July 16. However, either nobody applied for the new auction or the winners of the previous auctions failed to pay their financial dues. In any case, the General Secretariat demanded that all the new auction winners pay their dues by July 20. Failure to pay would result in the cancellation of the auction results and additional fees to help cover the costs of any future auctions.

The General Secretariat set July 19 as the date to start harvesting the year’s pistachio crop in all parts of the rural parts of the Idlib governorate that are under regime control – whether those lands are under investment from their actual owners or from public auction winners. In either case, the secretariat required farmers to obtain “crop harvest papers” from the governorate’s Directorate of Public and Legal Affairs. Such papers are granted only after applicants obtain clearances from the General Secretariat proving that they have met all their financial obligations for the farmlands.

Ostensibly, preference in the auctions was given to relatives of the farmland owners up to the fourth degree. The General Secretariat required relatives to submit applications in order to participate in the auctions, as well as pay the initial securities for any lands they won and invest in the lands at the final prices at which they were awarded. Amid these requirements, it is unclear what form of preference the landowners’ relatives actually received.

The recent auctions in Idlib bear similarities to those held in recent years in the Hama governorate. Both sets of auctions were based on Public Contracts Law No. 51 of 2004, which addresses contracts related to assets owned by public entities, and on Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform Circulars No. 169 of June 2021 and No. 438 of April 2022. The circulars referred to the conditions for applying to the auctions as well as the deposits that successful bidders must pay.

Until recently, regime forces had worked to harvest pistachio crops from all the lands they control in the Idlib governorate, without landowners’ consent and without compensating them. Back then, the regime considered the Idlib countryside a closed military zone and forbade civilians from entering unless they had prior security approval.

Pistachios are among the most important crops to Idlib’s economy. Cultivation is mainly concentrated around Khan Sheikhoun and Maaret Al-Numan. According to statistics from the Idlib Directorate of Agriculture, some 10,475 hectares of land in the governorate were cultivated with pistachios in 2013.

Picture: Announcement No. 580

The Damascus governorate announced in late June that it had issued Detailed Zoning Plan No. 106 for the Jobar neighbourhood of Damascus. The formal descriptions for all lands within the new plan were amended to “under regulation,” which means that construction for residential or commercial use or for public services is permitted. Previously, these lands were either protected zones, agricultural areas, or residential expansion zones. 

Under the Urban Planning Law, which was issued in Decree No. 5 of 1982 and amended by Law No. 41 of 2002, a detailed zoning plan is one that includes the main and subsidiary roads, pedestrian walkways, public spaces, and other details for land usage. The plan does not contradict the general master plan or construction codes. 

The Damascus governorate invited residents to review the detailed zoning plan, which is on public display in the lobby of the governorate’s building, and submit any objections within 30 days. The governorate’s regional committee, which is part of the Regional Planning Commission, will then study these objections. Each governorate has a regional committee affiliated to the Regional Planning Commission. After deciding on the objections, the Minister of Public Works and Housing would issue a decree including the detailed zoning plan. Finally, six months later, a presidential decree will be issued adopting the plan. 

While the total area of Jobar was previously less than 250 hectares, the new plan added neighbouring areas that administratively belonged to the Damascus and Rural Damascus governorates, for a new total area of 304 hectares. These newly added areas include parts of Qaboun, which already belonged to the Damascus governorate, as well as parts of Arbeen, Zamalka, and Ayn Tarma, which previously belonged to Rural Damascus. 

Since 2018, when regime forces recaptured opposition strongholds around Damascus, the Damascus governorate has expanded its administrative borders at the expense of the Rural Damascus governorate, especially along the northeast edges of the capital city.

Historically, Jobar was a small village in East Ghouta surrounded by swathes of farmland. Jobar was annexed to the capital city in 1968 under the Damascus master plan drawn by French architect Michel Écochard. The neighbourhood has seen rapid urban expansion since the 1970s, most of it informal and atop agricultural lands. 

Opposition forces controlled Jobar from 2012 to 2018. During this time, the neighbourhood became the first line of defence for opposition-held East Ghouta, with rebels building many fortifications, most notably trenches and tunnels. Jobar was the site of intense battles and faced aerial bombardments that destroyed many of the neighbourhood’s buildings. Finally, after the regime’s last military campaign on the area in early 2018, the remaining residents were forcibly displaced to northern Syria alongside residents of East Ghouta. Since then, regime forces have prevented people from entering Jobar while continuing a low-scale campaign to demolish buildings and remove rubble. 

The new detailed zoning plan was based on Decree No. 5 of 1982 and Écochard’s general plan for Damascus, which was approved by Ministerial Decree No. 2401 of 1968. The job of studying detailed zoning plans usually goes to the General Company for Engineering Studies (GCES), an affiliate of the Minister of Public Works and Housing. However, the Higher Institute for Regional Planning, which is affiliated with Damascus University, took on the task of studying the new Jobar plan. The plan was then approved by the Damascus governorate council in Decree No. 44 on September 7, 2021. It is unclear why the governorate delayed the announcement of the detailed zoning plan until June 2022.

The Damascus governorate’s Director of Urban Planning said that the implementation area for Detailed Zoning Plan No. 106 would be subject to the provisions of Planning and Urban Development Law No. 23 of 2015. What he meant by this is unclear, as Law No. 23 gives administrative units several options for regulating informal housing areas. First, an administrative unit may apply the provisions of Law No. 23 to such areas. Second, it may apply the provisions of Real Estate Development and Investment Law No. 15 of 2008 and its amendments based on an agreement between the real estate developer in a given area and the existing property owners or between the real estate developer and local administrative authorities. Finally, an administrative unit may choose to apply the provisions of the Expropriation Law in force in order to implement a zoning plan for the area in question. 

The degree to which local authorities will choose to implement Law No. 23 in Jobar will not become clear until the final decree approving the neighbourhood’s new detailed zoning plan is issued. 

Under Law No. 23, land is designated for construction according to both a general master plan and a detailed zoning plan through one of two ways: subdivision by the landowner or regulation by the local administrative body. In both cases, the implementation of Law No. 23 leads to the eviction of residents of that land without providing them alternative housing. 

Law No. 23 also entitles the administrative unit to the free deduction of up to 50 percent of private properties in governorate centres in return for the benefit of adding those properties to the zoning area.  

Finally, Law No. 23 stipulates that, as part of the zoning process, an administrative unit forms a compulsory land readjustment committee tasked with giving rights holders their shares of property in the same location as their original properties or nearby. As part of this readjustment process, rights holders within the area undergoing regulation receive land designated for construction within that same area as a form of compensation for losing their original properties. 

A section of the Jobar zoning plan

Source: the Damascus governorate

The distribution process for share certificates in the Al-Qadam zoned real estate area of eastern Damascus’ Basilia City is witnessing significant modifications – namely, changing the legal description of already zoned land and other changes to those properties’ entries in the Land Registry. 

On May 31, the Directorate for Implementation of Decree No. 66, affiliated with the Damascus governorate, invited rights holders in the Al-Qadam zoned real estate area to their share certificates (documents that entitle them to wholly or partly own shares within that area).

Decree No. 66 of 2012 stipulated the establishment of two zoned real estate areas in Damascus. The first, located southeast of Mazzeh, is known as Marota City, while the second, which includes all or some of Mazzeh, Kafr Sousseh, Qanawat Basatin, Darayya, and Qadam, is known as Basilia City. In late 2021, the Directorate for Implementation of Decree No. 66 announced that it had begun handing over share certificates within Basilia City. 

The shares for each rights holder are calculated by more than one committee via a complex process under Decree No. 66. To obtain their share certificates, rights holders must submit an official application to the Decree No. 66 directorate, file copies of their original title deeds for their properties, provide identity cards and pay a fee of SYP4,000 for each certificate. Two weeks after the application submission, the certificates are issued and approved by the Damascus governorate. 

Notably, Decree No. 66 directorate now requires that real estate owners or their legal representatives attend in person to receive the share certificates. So far, the directorate has not permitted the heirs of deceased real estate owners to obtain the deeds. According to one directorate employee who spoke with The Syria Report, the directorate is planning to hand over deeds to heirs in the coming weeks, but only after the heirs present legal inheritance documents. 

According to a local correspondent for The Syria Report, this discrepancy is due to a recent issue, namely that the legal descriptions for the land in parts of Basilia City have been changed, even after they were already zoned. Prior to the zoning of the area, the properties in Qadam were listed as Amiri lands and located outside the zoning plan. This meant that if the landowners died, the lands were subject to the legal inheritance process as issued by the civil magistrate court in accordance with the Law on Transfer of Immovable Amiri Properties of 1928. 

However, when Amiri lands are annexed into a city, as is currently happening with the Qadam Amiri lands in Basilia City, the legal description of those properties automatically changes from Amiri to “mulk,” or owned land. When that occurs, the provisions of legal inheritance, as laid out in Personal Status Law No. 76 of 2010, are applied instead. For inheritors, this change of rules means that when a re-zoning process, like that in Basilia City, occurs, they must submit a legal inheritance document compiled before the Sharia court. Distribution of legal inheritance must comply with several essential rules: (1) Distribution favours the nearest degree of kinship to the deceased; (2) Distribution must favour relatives with closer paternal kinship to the deceased; and (3) Male heirs receive double the share of inheritance as female heirs, though only when they have an equal degree of kinship to the deceased. 

It is unclear whether these same procedures are being applied to other real estate areas in Basilia City. 

Meanwhile, rights holders currently living outside of Syria as refugees and who are wanted by the security services cannot return home to receive their share certificates. They also cannot appoint legal representatives to obtain the bonds on their behalf because legal representation requires prior security approval. In such cases, the security services require refugees to undergo “security settlement” at Syrian embassies in their host countries, on top of paying monetary compensation for their compulsory military service if they have failed to serve. Afterwards, they may apply for security approval required for legal representation.  

According to the correspondent, some concessions were also granted for issuing the share certificates, such as giving additional authority to the Decree No. 66 directorate to remove “upgrades” to some notations within the real estate pages for properties in the zoned area. It is still unclear where the limits of this authority lie and what types of notations the directorate is permitted to remove. However, real estate owners have the right to submit a request to the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs to upgrade certain notes placed within the Land Registry for their properties. They may follow up on the request at the Decree No. 66 directorate headquarters, rather than before the court, which was previously the case. The directorate refers the property owner to the competent authority in cases where the Decree No. 66 directorate does not have the authority to upgrade certain notations.

This year has not seen any public auction to lease agricultural lands belonging to IDPs who fled regime-held territory in the Sabkheh and Maadan districts in the Raqqa governorate. Instead, a handful of existing lease contracts were renewed for the same tenants who rented the lands in the last agricultural season. In some cases where previous tenants declined to renew their contracts, the lands were leased to pro-regime militia leaders in the area.  

The rental price per hectare of land reached SYP 500,000 in 2022, while last year prices ranged from SYP 300,000 to 400,000. 

The Raqqa Farmers’ Syndicate announced on March 14, 2021 that it would hold the area’s first public auction for agricultural lands. However, the syndicate did not specify which administrative area the auctioned lands would belong to or the type of crops that winning tenants would be required to cultivate.

According to a correspondent for The Syria Report, the lands offered in the auctions are located in the Sabkheh and Maadan districts of the Raqqa governorate and are owned by people who fled the area after regime forces took control in mid-2017. The local farmers’ syndicate includes 22 farmers’ societies in villages across Sabkheh and Maadan, an area known for cultivating cotton, wheat and corn.

In Syria, a farmers’ society is a group formed at the village level or among a group of neighbouring villages. A farmers’ syndicate, on the other hand, is a group of farmers’ societies and runs at the administrative district level. A group of syndicates form a governorate farmers’ union and, finally, those governorate unions together comprise the nationwide General Farmers’ Union. Because the area under regime control in the Raqqa governorate is small, the governorate appears to have only one syndicate grouping the different farmers societies.

There were very few applicants for investment in the previous auction in March 2021, prompting the farmers’s syndicate to postpone it more than once before finally holding the auction on May 1, 2021. This lack of interest in the auction was due mainly to the strong tribal relationships between current residents of Sabkheh and Maadan and former residents who fled to areas of the governorate that are now under the control of the majority-Kurdish Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES). People from the area typically frown on any social rifts between current residents and displaced persons, as they are all members of the area’s tribes. In some cases, auction bidders faced serious threats and were forced to withdraw.  

Though the local farmers’ syndicate announced in March 2021 that it intended to lease 66.7 hectares of agricultural land, a former mukhtar — a neighbourhood mayor — of one of the area villages told The Syria Report that the actual leased area was many times greater than that number. According to the mukhtar, in his village alone some 130 hectares of land were offered for rent.

The total area of farmland offered for rent in 2022 is less than in 2021, the correspondent said. This is due to some displaced land owners returning home to undergo “reconciliation” with the regime, a process that involves opposition-affiliated locals settling their status with regime security services, undergoing investigations and writing personal pledges not to engage again with anti-regime activities. 

In 2021, each village in the Sabkheh and Maaden districts formed its own committee to determine which displaced land owners’ properties would be offered in the auction. Each of the committees included that village’s farmers society president, the village mukhtar and a Baath Party secretary. However, displaced land owners were not the only ones whose properties were included in the auction. Also listed in the auction were agricultural lands owned by current residents whose opposition-affiliated sons had fled to AANES territory in the Raqqa governorate, as well as those whose sons had refused to be enlisted in the regime’s military forces. 

Previously, in the 2019 and 2020 agricultural seasons, regime military officers and some members of the Tribal Army and the Friends Movement, two pro-regime militias, took possession of some displaced landowners’ farms, which they cultivated and harvested from without providing any justification or legal basis for doing so.