Syrians displaced by war return to find homes occupied : NPR

AL GHASSANiyah, Syria – Under the golden autumn sun, Abdullah Ibrahim harvests handfuls of hard, green olives with obvious delight.

“We have been deprived of this pleasure for the last 14 years,” he said with a sigh.

His family and most of the residents of his village, Al Ghassaniyah, were forced to flee barrel bombs and frequent shelling during the second year of the Syrian civil war that began in 2011. Some people stayed after Sunni Islamist rebel groups left – but they too left this historic Christian village after the killing of a priest.

Ibrahim is one of Estimated 7.4 million During the war, Syrian people were displaced within the country. About 6 million people fled abroad as refugees. But after the old regime was ousted last December, Ibrahim and other Syrians began returning to their family homes.

Some of them were surprised. They found strangers living in their homes. Some others were displaced Syrians. Many were rebel fighters from other countries.

“If people want to go back to their homes, they can’t stay there. Their houses have been taken over by someone else. We can’t live shoulder to shoulder with them,” says 65-year-old Ibrahim.

Now, almost a year after the war’s end, deciding who owns what in the chaos of war remains a pressing issue. new state officials is called Syrian refugees abroad to return to the country.

But, they also need to allow internally displaced Syrians to return to their original homes and resolve questions of property ownership – 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.

left in the chaos of war

Last December, pleased with the end of the war, Ibrahim drove from Aleppo to his family’s ancestral village in northern Syria, where he had once been mayor, to inspect the family home. They feared it had been destroyed by Russian shelling or rebel artillery.

To his relief, there stood the stone and concrete house he had inherited from his parents. But he could not enter inside.

They found foreign fighters living in the house. Someone had also cut down most of his fruit trees – he never found out who – and his crop of large olive trees at the bottom of the village had also been taken over by foreign fighters.

Women also lived in his house. He could not tell who they were because he was not allowed to talk to them. He says he was wearing a full black mask, with only his eyes open. “The male fighters mostly didn’t speak Arabic, so I couldn’t communicate with them,” he says.

His story is common throughout Syria. As rebel and former regime forces divided areas and cities, people fled their homes. In their absence, rebel Syrian fighters – as well as foreign Islamic fighters from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Morocco and other countries, including thousands of ethnic Uyghur fighters fleeing China – moved into their and their neighbors’ homes. He says he had permission to do so.

“(Syrian) commanders told us, look, you people need houses, and your people helped a lot in the liberation of this area, so you can go into houses where the owners have left and the houses are empty houses,” he recalls. The deputy commander of the Uyghur force, a man known only by his first name Jalaldin.

Earlier this year, About 4,000 residents of Al Ghassaniyah officially applied to Syria’s new housing authority to return. Uyghur officials then spent months finding new housing for hundreds of Uyghur families who had settled in abandoned Syrian homes – an undertaking they found challenging as rental prices have soared since the end of the war.

The Uighurs say they respect the claims of the original inhabitants. Bilal, a Uighur fighter who lives in a former Shia village, said, “This is not our country. Many religious groups and ethnic groups already live here, and we are all equal. If the owners (of this house) come back, I will leave.” He wanted to be identified only by his first name to protect his family members in China, where Uighurs face persecution.

Nevertheless, some Syrians, particularly minority groups such as Christians and Shias, remain fearful of foreign fighters settling in northern Syria. And it seems he has no intentions of quitting in the near future.

“Our neighbors have been fed this Salafi ideology, and it’s become part of their worldview. They don’t want us there,” says Denis Khouri, 75, referring to the fundamentalist strain of Islam. She says she investigated her mother’s house in the northern city of Jisr al-Shughur and found foreign fighters living inside.

find out what belongs to whom

Even before the Syrian war ended, some rebel groups recognized the urgency of returning land and homes.

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

“They promised that our rights would be restored, recognizing that we ‘Nazarenes’ were part of this country and were entitled to get back what was taken during the chaos, which no one can deny,” says Luay Bisharat, 43, using a term used colloquially by some radical Muslims to refer to Christians. it is bad A priest who helped lead the meetings.

In 2024, a few months before Shaara-led rebel groups overthrew the Assad regime, Bisharat says he met with Assad al-Shaibani, now Syria’s foreign minister, and shortly thereafter they were able to reclaim some churches and land that had been captured by rebel fighters.

Zikwan Haji Hamoud, 32, a real estate agent in Jisr al-Shughur, says another layer of difficulty in sorting out ownership was that people were selling property on behalf of other Syrians who had left the country, or even selling property they did not directly own. “During the Revolution, there was a lot of fiddling with property deeds,” he says.

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

Roman Catholic priest Fadi Azar, who represents Christian communities in Syria is helping people get their land back, says that at first the foreign fighters demanded $50 per dunam, about a quarter of an acre, but residents rejected the offer.

Eventually, everyone agreed on the deadline of October, after the autumn olive harvest. “They reached an agreement that two-thirds of the crop would be for them and one-third would be for the owner, the Christian who owned the land,” says Azar.

In November, Ibrahim, the former mayor of Al Ghassaniyah village, reached out to NPR with good news: All land and houses had been returned to their original owners. Al Ghassaniyah held mass celebrations with dancing and drummers to mark the occasion. Some village buildings were blown up during the war, other buildings were damaged due to graffiti left by the warring groups. But now their owners can begin rebuilding.