Syrians displaced by war return to find homes occupied : NPR

AL GHASANIYA, Syria — Under the golden autumn sun, Abdallah Ibrahim takes obvious pleasure in picking handfuls of firm green olives.

“We have been deprived of this pleasure for the last 14 years,” he sighs.

Barrel bombs and constant shelling forced his family and most of the residents of his village of Al-Ghasaniya to flee during the second year of the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. Some stayed even when Sunni Islamist rebel groups moved in, but they too left after a priest was killed in the historically Christian village.

Ibrahim is one of approximately 7.4 million Syrians displaced internally during the war. About 6 million fled abroad as refugees. But after the old regime was toppled last December, Ibrahim and other Syrians began returning to their family homes.

Some of them were in for a surprise. They discovered strangers living in their houses. Some of them were other displaced Syrians. Many of them were fighters from other countries.

“If people want to return to their homes, they will not be able to live there. Their houses have been taken over by someone else,” says 65-year-old Ibrahim. “We can't live side by side with them.”

Now, almost a year after the end of the war, figuring out what belongs to whom after the chaos of war remains a pressing problem. Officials from the new state called on the return of Syrian refugees abroad to the country.

But they also need internally displaced Syrians to return to their original homes and clarify property ownership issues – and they need to reassure displaced members of Syrian minority groups, such as Christians like Ibrahim, as well as Shia Muslims, that they too can get their homes back.

Abandoned in the chaos of war

Last December, encouraged by the end of the war, Ibrahim drove from Aleppo to his family's home village in northern Syria, where he was once mayor, to check on the family home. He feared it had been destroyed by Russian shelling or rebel artillery.

To his relief, the stone and concrete house he inherited from his parents stood. But he couldn't enter.

He discovered that foreign fighters were living in the house. Someone also tore out most of his fruit trees – he was never sure who – and the harvest from his large olive groves, located at the foot of the village, was also seized by foreign fighters.

Women also lived in his house. He couldn't tell who they were because he wasn't allowed to talk to them. He says they wore full black niqabs, leaving only their eyes exposed. “The male fighters mostly didn’t speak Arabic, so I couldn’t communicate with them,” he says.

His story is shared throughout Syria. As rebel and former regime forces split regions and cities in half, people fled their homes. In their absence, Syrian rebel fighters, as well as foreign Islamist fighters from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Morocco and other countries, including thousands of ethnic Uighur fighters who fled China, have moved into his and his neighbors' homes. They say they had permission to do this.

” [Syrian] The commanders told us, look, guys, you need houses, and your guys helped a lot with the liberation of this area so that you could go into houses where the owners had left and the houses were empty,” the commander recalls. Deputy commander of the Uyghur forces, a man known only by his first name, Jalaldin.

At the beginning of this year, all of Al-Ghasaniya's approximately 4,000 residents formally petitioned the new Syrian Housing Authority to return. Uyghur officers then spent months finding new housing for hundreds of Uyghur families settled in abandoned Syrian houses. This task proved challenging for them as rental prices rose after the end of the war.

The Uyghurs say they respect the demands of the indigenous people. “This is not our country. There are already many religious groups and ethnic groups living here, and we are all equal. If the owners [of this house] come back, then I'll leave,” said Bilal, a Uighur fighter living in the former Shiite village. He wanted to be identified only by his first name to protect his family members in China, where Uyghurs are persecuted.

However, some Syrians, especially members of minority groups such as Christians and Shiites, remain wary of foreign fighters based in northern Syria. and doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.

“Our neighbors drank the milk of this Salafi ideology, and it became part of their worldview. They don't want us there,” said Denise Khoury, 75, referring to the fundamentalist brand of Islam. She says she checked her mother's house in the northern city of Jisr al-Shughour and found foreign fighters living inside.

Finding out what belongs to whom

Even before the end of the Syrian war, some rebel groups realized the seriousness of retaking land and homes.

In 2022, the Christian congregation met with then-Syrian militia leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who will become the country's president in 2024 and this month became the first Syrian leader to visit the White House.

“He promised that our rights would be restored, recognizing that we 'Nazarenes' are part of this country and have the right to take back what was taken away during the chaos, which no one can deny,” says Luai Bisharat, 43, using a term referring to Christians that is colloquially used by some fundamentalist Muslims. Bisharat a priest who helped lead the meetings.

In 2024, months before rebel groups led by Sharaa overthrew the Assad regime, Bisharat says he met with Asaad al-Shaibani, now Syria's foreign minister, and soon after was able to retake some churches and land occupied by the rebels.

Ziqwan Haji Hamoud, 32, a real estate agent in Jisr al-Shughour, said another layer of difficulty in determining ownership was people selling properties on behalf of other Syrians who had fled the country, or even selling properties they did not directly own. “During the revolution there was a lot of games with property documents,” he says.

In some cases, militants and their families also built new structures on land they occupied, and the new state had no mechanism to compensate them for any new buildings.

Fadi Azar, a Roman Catholic priest who has helped represent Christian communities in Syria to reclaim their lands, says foreign fighters initially asked for $50 per dunam, roughly a quarter of an acre, but residents refused the offer.

In the end, everyone agreed on October, after the autumn olive harvest. “They agreed that two-thirds of the harvest would belong to them and one-third would belong to the owner, the Christian who owns the land,” Azar says.

In November, Ibrahim, the former mayor of the village of Al-Ghasaniya, spoke to NPR with good news: all the land and houses had been returned to their original owners. In honor of this event, Al-Ghasaniya held massive celebrations with dancing and drumming. Some of the village's buildings were blown up during the war, others were defaced by graffiti left by passing militant groups. But now their owners can begin restoration.