Ramadan left Syria in May 2011, at the age of 24, before he had completed his studies at Damascus University. He returned to the Syrian capital in December 2024, two weeks after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, following 13 years in exile.
He went into exile as a student and a former detainee at the General Intelligence Directorate’s notorious Branch 251, also known as al-Khatib Branch, silenced by state surveillance and repression and at risk of arrest for his political and social activism. He returned as a father, having spent 13 years working in the humanitarian and civil society sectors in support of Syria.
Despite all that had changed, for Ramadan, one dream had remained constant: retrieving his unpublished poetry collections and writings, hidden in the Damascus house he had been forced to leave, and publishing them, this time without fear. Ramadan returned to find that his life had been erased, poem by poem, brick by brick, law by law.
In al-Mazzeh district, southwest of central Damascus, at Ramadan’s former apartment in the neighborhood known as al-Mazzeh 86 Khazzan, the white stone facade was weathered, the balcony bare. The door, once his, was locked from the inside. In his absence, Assad regime loyalists had seized the property, not through any transparent legal process but under the cover of arbitrary laws and decrees issued by the presidential authority; decrees that allowed the state to expropriate homes from dissidents and reassign them to loyalists, with no consent or judicial oversight. What once required a court order had become an administrative formality — legalized theft disguised as governance. Ramadan could see his apartment, but he couldn’t touch it.
In 2014, Ramadan’s apartment was seized by the so-called “Branch 215” of Syria’s Military Intelligence Directorate (not to be confused with the General Intelligence Branch 251). Yet the story began before this. In 2012, a doctor who had fled the Assad regime’s siege and bombardment of the southern Damascus suburb of Daraya took refuge with his family in Ramadan’s home. They stayed there for two years, until a neighbor who was affiliated with Branch 215 reported their presence at a nearby military checkpoint. The doctor later told Ramadan that this neighbor had informed the authorities that displaced people from Daraya were living there. Soon after this, Branch 215 arrived, forcibly evicted the doctor’s family and installed one of their agents in the apartment.
Already in exile himself, Ramadan only learned of this through the doctor, who ultimately fled Syria too. Ramadan later managed to contact the neighbor in question, who today denies any connection to Branch 215, fearing for his safety now that the regime has fallen. At the time, however, the neighbor admitted to informing the regime forces at the checkpoint, claiming he did so to “protect” the apartment from being seized by others. Whether this was an act of betrayal or misguided loyalty remains unclear. What is certain is that, seven years later, in 2021, the regime loyalist occupying the apartment quietly handed it off to another crony, who fraudulently changed the deed and claimed to have sold it, all without Ramadan’s knowledge or consent.
The Assad regime is now gone. But the machinery it built, the bureaucracy of theft and silence, remains. No court will hear Ramadan’s case; no judge has the power to. So Ramadan rents another apartment, while the one he bought in 2007 is occupied by strangers. His story is tragic but not unique.
In wartime Syria, housing became one of the regime’s most powerful tools of repression and social engineering. What began as selective confiscation of “absentee” properties expanded into state-enabled looting, targeted demolition and demographic reshaping. Now, for millions trying to return, there is often nothing left but a hollow shell. The house may stand, but it is no longer their home. This is a story of stolen property, stolen futures and a legal vacuum that risks making the thefts permanent.
The Assad regime didn’t need to break into every home with brute force; it built a system that legalized dispossession. In 2012, Decree 66 authorized the demolition of informal housing in Damascus under the guise of “urban redevelopment.” In practice, it targeted opposition-leaning suburbs, displacing residents with little or no compensation. In 2018, Law No. 10 expanded this model nationwide.
Marketed merely as a planning initiative, Law No. 10 became a blueprint for mass expropriation. Syrians had just 30 days to present ownership documents in person, an impossible task for millions in exile or listed as “wanted,” for whom return meant risking arrest or death. Even Syrians displaced internally were trapped. Many had lost deeds, ID cards or inheritance papers during bombings, lootings or hasty escapes. The regime knew this.
Legal erasure was only the beginning. Bombs followed. Many areas, such as Daraya, Eastern Ghouta and parts of Homs and Aleppo, were leveled, not by accident but by design. Assad’s forces deliberately targeted homes, schools, bakeries and hospitals: symbols of daily life with no military value. Barrel bombs dropped from helicopters crushed entire residential blocks.
A 2019 United Nations assessment used satellite imagery to map the scale of destruction across Syrian cities and found Aleppo to be the most heavily devastated, with approximately 36,000 buildings destroyed. The Eastern Ghouta suburb of Damascus followed closely behind, with around 35,000 damaged structures, while Homs ranked third with an estimated 13,778 buildings reduced to rubble.
When the bombing stopped, looting began. Regime troops, allied forces from Lebanon’s Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militias stripped homes of doors, wiring, plumbing and even rebar. Entire buildings were dismantled and sold for scrap. When many displaced Syrians returned, they found not homes but ruins. The buildings they had once lived in were unsafe, stripped bare and often no longer legally theirs. Many lacked the means to rebuild, while others couldn’t prove they had ever lived there.
This campaign of legal theft, targeted bombing and organized looting didn’t just punish opposition areas; it redrew Syria’s demographic map. It erased restive districts, rewarded loyalists and made return nearly impossible. The message was unmistakable: Unless you stood with the regime, you had no right to stand anywhere.
The modest apartment that Ramadan left behind when he fled Syria was not just his property; it represented the life he had tried to build in Damascus. But after military intelligence broke in and seized it, a regime loyalist moved in. Ramadan’s belongings vanished. For years, he clung to what little he still had: an ownership document from 2007 and an electricity bill from 2009.
In 2021, a new betrayal came. A well-connected loyalist contacted Ramadan’s father, an elderly engineer who had spent decades working in the Gulf. The loyalist claimed the apartment was about to be auctioned by Branch 215 but said he could stop it, if Ramadan returned. Wary of regime traps, Ramadan refused. He warned his father not to trust anyone.
But the loyalist persisted. Preying on the father’s fears and hopes, he persuaded him to grant him power of attorney, promising it would be a temporary measure until his son’s return. Eventually, the father relented. Instead of saving the home, the loyalist used the opportunity to transfer the deed into his own name and claimed to have sold it to another crony. The entire transaction, like thousands of others across wartime Syria, was fraudulent, cloaked in forged documents and regime approvals.
When Ramadan returned to Damascus in late 2024, after the regime’s collapse, the apartment was still standing, but no longer his. The contract in his hand meant nothing. The loyalist’s fake paperwork was official.
He now pays $400 a month to live elsewhere. He walks past his old street but avoids looking up. That home was memory, continuity and resistance. Its theft is a wound that still bleeds.
Basel, a 32-year-old resident of Eastern Ghouta, once trained professionally as a pastry chef specializing in both European and Middle Eastern desserts. Today, he drives a taxi through the streets of Damascus, his culinary dreams long shelved. In 2013, he fled his home with his wife and baby daughter to escape the political violence. The next day, his house was reduced to rubble in a bombing. A month later, his wife, a young doctor, was killed on her way to work by a regime sniper. Soon afterward, armed men forced Basel to sign a fake sale document at gunpoint and stole his car. With no home, no wife and no work, he fled Ghouta.
When he returned in 2018, his house and shop were gone, bulldozed into flat, silent ground. Today, he lives in a rented apartment with his daughter. He still keeps the old key to a door that no longer exists.
The war in Syria didn’t end when the bombs stopped. It metastasized, turning homes into borders and neighbors into strangers. Millions were displaced again and again by shifting front lines, ceasefires and occupations. Assad’s destruction of homes and weaponization of property law created ripple effects, igniting new tensions far from regime territory.
In Afrin, a Kurdish-majority city in northern Syria, the war left deep scars not only on homes but on a way of life nurtured for generations. Kurdish families who fled Turkish offensives in 2018 returned to find their houses occupied and their centuries-old olive trees, once symbols of care and continuity, uprooted or cut down.
Many of these homes had been reassigned to Syrians displaced from Ghouta or Aleppo, themselves victims of Assad’s sieges and forced evacuations.
But for Afrin’s Kurds, the loss was deeply personal. Their homes were stripped, their orchards destroyed and their communities left unrecognizable.
What began as a regime-led strategy of displacement in southern Syria triggered a cascade that displaced others in the north, replacing one group’s trauma with another’s. Though more quietly, the war continued to reshape lives, one emptied home or felled tree at a time.
Many internally displaced people, themselves victims of looting, had nothing. Some removed windows or doors, not to steal, but to survive, using them to rebuild what little they could.
This tragic cycle has hardened mistrust. Ghouta’s Sunni Arab families feel scapegoated. Afrin’s Kurdish families feel erased. In March 2025, the U.N. refugee agency estimated that 7.4 million Syrians remained internally displaced. Most live not in camps but in informal shelters, abandoned schools or overcrowded rentals.
Until the internal displacement crisis is addressed, it will remain premature to talk of refugee returns. It demands more than tents: It demands justice and an honest reckoning with how homes became weapons of war.
The use of housing as a tool of repression is not uniquely Syrian. It occurred in Germany between 1933 and 1953 — not only during the Nazi regime but also in the years that followed, as the country struggled to confront the legacy of mass expropriation.
In one of the earliest and most bureaucratically sophisticated forms of property theft, the Nazi regime expropriated Jewish homes, in a process they called “Aryanization.” Entire neighborhoods were emptied of their Jewish residents, whose homes and businesses were given to non-Jews. Property laws, tax codes and planning offices became instruments of ethnic cleansing.
After 1945, West Germany faced both a legal and moral reckoning. But the injustice did not end with the fall of the Nazis. Many “Aryanized” properties remained in the hands of private individuals, businesses or state institutions. Local authorities often resisted restitution, allowing the beneficiaries of Nazi-era policies to continue to occupy or profit from stolen homes. Only in 1953 did the West German government pass the Federal Compensation Law, which marked the beginning of a systematic national effort to address these crimes.
This law was part of a broader restitution framework known as “Wiedergutmachung,” literally meaning “making good again.” It provided financial compensation and, in some cases, the return of property to Jewish survivors and other victims of Nazi persecution. Only those directly affected, such as Holocaust survivors, forced laborers and those who had been dispossessed for racial, political or religious reasons, were eligible. Though the process was politically contentious and far from perfect, it laid a critical foundation for democratic recovery and postwar reconciliation by embedding accountability into the legal and moral fabric of the new democratic state.
Syria faces an even more complex task. There has been no full regime change and no international oversight. The bureaucracy established during the Assad era is still in place, in property records, decrees and institutions.
Unlike in Germany, where the population was largely static, Syria’s housing crisis involves multiple, overlapping waves of displacement: from regime-held to opposition-held areas, from northwest to northeast Syria and back again, from cities to camps and, now, for some, to the cities once more.
Housing in post-Assad Syria is not just a logistical challenge; it is a foundational test of justice. The fall of the regime will not by itself undo more than a decade of dispossession. Without a coordinated, transparent housing policy, Syria risks entering a new era of property-based retaliation, contested claims and deeper fragmentation.
Housing restitution cannot be an afterthought in reconstruction; it must be the starting point for a new social contract. Syrians must return not just to a physical structure but to a place where their rights and dignity are recognized by law and protected by functioning institutions.
This is especially urgent for the millions of displaced people still scattered across camps, informal settlements or urban peripheries. Too often ignored in debates about refugee returns, they are central to national reintegration. Without a clear legal mechanism to resolve property claims, local tensions will erupt. Every stripped home and broken lock remains a symbol of unresolved injustice.
This is not only Syria’s burden, but also a global responsibility. Governments advocating that refugees return, particularly in Europe, must acknowledge that housing insecurity is one of the main reasons people don’t go back to Syria.
Housing justice must be central to postconflict planning. The laws that enabled mass seizure of property must be repealed, while a national housing claims commission must be established to verify property titles and resolve disputes. There must be a legal avenue for displaced people to return to their homes or seek compensation. One means of ensuring that the new Syrian government implements these changes would be tying reconstruction aid to progress on housing restitution. The government should also support reconciliation programs that help communities recognize their shared losses.
There is no shortcut to rebuilding Syria. But there is a path forward: Justice begins at the doorstep. A house is not just shelter; it is memory, belonging and identity. If Syria is to heal, it must begin with the right of every Syrian to return home, with dignity, to a place still standing in law as well as in stone.
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