With the last items bought for her detained husband, Riham Hammoudeh was finally ready for the next day’s hopeful journey. On Saturday morning, Oct. 25, she would take her two young sons, Adam and Ali, aged 6 and 4, from their home in the al-Walid suburb on the war-scarred eastern edge of Homs to the civil prison in Hama, in central Syria.
The trip is around 40 miles, but it took Hammoudeh more than three hours. In Syria, years of war have turned even simple family visits into epic undertakings. Her husband, a former army officer in the dissolved Syrian military, had been held in Hama since the beginning of the year, one of thousands swept up in wide-ranging security campaigns. Now, on this Friday evening, everything was finally ready. All that remained was to go home, rest and cling to the fragile hope that tomorrow’s long-awaited visit, the first in a year, might bring some relief.
As she walked the short distance toward her apartment building, weary-footed and accompanied by her relative Samar, she had no idea that the next day’s relief would never come. When they reached the building entrance, a motorbike roared up behind them. They had no time to turn around. Two men were on the bike, the driver and a man behind him. The latter stretched out his hand and hurled something toward the women before the bike sped off. It was a hand grenade. It went off the moment it hit the building’s entrance, tearing Hammoudeh apart and leaving Samar badly wounded and unconscious. Adam and Ali could only watch from the window, unable to grasp anything except their mother’s final scream.
Hammoudeh was not the first to be killed at her doorstep like this. On July 10, schoolteacher Liyal Dummar Gharib was gunned down in front of her workplace, the Walid al-Najjar School, by unknown assailants on a motorbike. Hammoudeh herself was a teacher at Subeah Rajjoub Primary School. Both victims belonged to the Alawite community of Homs and lived in the predominantly Alawite neighborhoods of al-Zahraa and al-Walid. Nor would Hammoudeh be the last: Tit-for-tat violence tore through Homs once again over the weekend.
These tragedies are far from random. They join a growing list of incidents of communal violence in “the capital of the revolution,” which, since the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in December 2024, has become a major site of sectarian killings. Figures from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) paint a stark picture: In October 2025 alone, Homs recorded 17 sectarian-motivated deaths out of 19 killings across the governorate. With 57 victims of sectarian violence nationwide that month, Homs ranked first in this grim tally. After releasing these figures and maintaining its criticism of the authorities and their supporters, the SOHR has found itself under fierce attack from backers of Syria’s new ruling order, even though it had been one of the opposition’s main tools for countering Assad-era narratives.
The SOHR’s figures offer only a snapshot of a city that has endured some of the deepest wounds of Syria’s internecine war, across all its neighborhoods, communities and classes. Homs has earned the unfortunate title of “Syria’s Dresden.” Today, the trickle of bloodshed is accompanied by another painful reality: the return of people displaced for more than a decade to homes that don’t resemble what they left. This return is happening alongside other changes driven by the ongoing restructuring of the army and security services.
Other civil wars have shown that once a place has suffered shelling, destruction or forced displacement, its demographic landscape never truly returns to what it was before. Indeed, large segments of the original population simply never return. Figures published by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in 2019 revealed that 13,778 buildings in Homs, including residential structures, were partially, severely or completely damaged. Little remains of the homes — apart from the deep wounds. The return rate is estimated to be very low.
Late on Oct. 29, a commander from a faction belonging to the so-called 52nd Division, a new formation ostensibly under the Ministry of Defense and stationed temporarily in Homs, stormed the Traffic Police branch in the city. The reason? One of the commander’s relatives had his motorbike confiscated by the branch. Earlier that day, military police had removed the relative from the premises, only for him to return at night with a larger force, detain the traffic patrol, assault its members and throw them into the faction’s own military jail.
This was not an isolated incident. It exposed how a security vacuum and raw force now shape what remains of Syria’s state institutions, including civilian police (in this case, the Traffic Police). These institutions were dissolved, their personnel were dismissed and they were then hastily reassembled into hollow structures stripped of order or power.
The attackers of the Traffic Police branch were Sunnis, the majority sect in Syria. Violence in Homs can lend itself to a sectarian reading, especially given that recent victims have predominantly been Alawite men and women, but that reading is flawed. The attack on the police branch shows that sectarianism is not the only explanation.
Behind every crime lie layered, often hidden motives — economic grievances, personal vendettas and the opportunism made possible by gaps in security. Still, acknowledging this complexity does not erase the sectarian imprint that many of these crimes carry.
Nor is this explosive mix unique to Homs. It is present across Syria, where levels of animosity, tension and mutual hatred have reached dangerous levels. The situation has worsened over the past year with the fall of the Assad regime, driven by a surge in populist sectarian rhetoric, often echoed by the new authorities, the collapse of the rule of law and regulatory bodies, and a deepening economic crisis fueled by attempts to liberalize an already collapsed economy.
The tally of victims reflects profound social fractures, which lead to conflicts, not only over the dead and the disappeared, but also over power, property and life itself. New warnings of violence resound, turning the daily life of Syria’s poor into a lottery of extreme risks.
Homs bears an exceptionally heavy burden. The city carries a surplus of wounds and polarization unmatched elsewhere. Its history, tied to its standing as a seat of the Syrian revolution and its place in subsequent sectarian warfare, makes its everyday violence much more ominous and more entrenched.
Once the largest Syrian governorate by area, Homs long served as a kind of genuine national laboratory for coexistence among diverse religious, social and class groups. For decades beginning in the 1960s, the city’s rapid urbanization and the influx of rural populations, both Alawite and Sunni, were propelled by new industrial projects such as the local fertilizer plant. Social relations remained largely calm, helped by a degree of economic and social justice under a welfare state. This was visible in neighborhoods like al-Zahira and al-Abbasiyyin, home to large numbers of industrial workers. The same expansion saw Bedouin communities settle on the outskirts and inside the city in areas like Deir Baalbah and al-Bayadah until the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, the old core neighborhoods — Baba Amr, al-Khalidiyyah and Bab al-Sebaa, among others — struggled to grow within their cramped planning limits.
Yet contrary to this “tolerance” — insofar as that word carries meaning when it was enforced through fear of the Assad regime — historians and researchers of the Syrian conflict have openly acknowledged that the same Homs that in 2011 appeared to shoulder the revolution almost alone was also the place where the first sectarian-tinged clashes emerged. Among those who noted this was Azmi Bishara, one of the Arab Spring’s most prominent analysts, in his book “Syria: A Way of Suffering to Freedom.”
Bishara traces the roots of sectarian polarization to several incidents that preceded or accompanied the “Friday of Dignity” on March 25, 2011, a turning point in the city’s uprising. On that day, still very early in the revolution, protesters tore down Bashar al-Assad’s portrait at the entrance of the Officers’ Club near the Old Clock Square. Supporters of Assad, mostly Alawites backed by security forces, responded with a counterprotest and clashed with the demonstrators, who were predominantly Sunni. Several of the demonstrators were arrested and tortured, then later released on bail. In the following weeks, gunfire intensified, and at least 15 demonstrators, all Sunni, were killed by security forces during a failed sit-in at the New Clock Square on April 18, 2011.
According to Bishara and his sources, young men from the Alawite neighborhood of al-Zahira attacked the al-Nour Mosque in neighboring al-Khalidiyyah, killing several youths there (Bishara provides no citation or date for this account). This, he argues, triggered sectarian slogans, such as “Let’s speak openly: No more Alawites,” among the protesters, followed by the infamous chant “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the coffin.” Soon after came the assassination of several army officers: Maj. Iyad Harfoush and Col. Mueen Mahalla, both Alawite, and Col. Abdou Khodr al-Tallawi, a Sunni loyalist. These early events marked the clear beginning of the sectarian phase that would redefine the Syrian revolution. At the same time, they marked a near-complete rupture between the city’s religious communities (Sunni, Alawite and Christian).
By March 2012, opposition factions had taken control of large parts of the city: Baba Amr, al-Khalidiyyah and Old Homs. As the city became split between government and opposition forces, a geographical division emerged in the east of Homs between neighborhoods with Alawite and Shiite majorities and those with Sunni majorities. This divide turned all of al-Sittin Street, running north to south, into a long front line. Crossing it was perilous, and most who attempted to do so were killed.
In the years that followed, kidnappings multiplied across Homs. Armed groups and criminal gangs abducted people for a range of motives: to intimidate families seen as sympathetic to the opposition, to extort money or to traffic victims’ organs. A climate of terror spread even into neighborhoods under regime control, such as al-Mahatta, al-Malaab, Karm al-Shami and al-Inshaat. Businesses stalled in the city, markets closed and those who stepped outside their homes during this security breakdown risked abduction. Many disappeared without a trace. Among these were 13 men from al-Mahatta who went missing in 2013 and were never found, their captors never identified.
Over 13 years of conflict, Homs has undergone a demographic transformation, losing nearly half its population — from 865,000 in 2010 to around 428,000 in 2024. This dramatic decline came as a result of successive waves of forced displacement, sieges and military campaigns targeting Sunni and Christian neighborhoods, including the 2012 offensives on Baba Amr and al-Inshaat, which lasted until 2014, and the siege of al-Waer, which continued until 2017. These military operations, compounded by worsening security and economic conditions, steadily drained the city’s Sunni and Christian population, resulting in a dramatic change to the city’s sectarian geography. The proportion of Sunnis fell from 65% to 51%, and the proportion of Christians fell from 12% to 8%. Meanwhile, the proportion of Alawites rose from 20% to 34%, and Shiite and other minorities grew from 2.5% of the population to 6%.
The city witnessed brutal battles between the Syrian army and rebel groups, many of which were Islamist and/or jihadist-oriented. As a result, half of Homs’ neighborhoods were partially or completely destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of mostly Sunni residents were displaced across the world. After the fall of Assad, these residents began returning, but without any government or international support. Their return itself became a source of new anxiety: Many found their homes destroyed by the war or occupied by others.
The stories people in Homs tell about those years diverge sharply, much like the competing narratives surrounding the fall of the Assad regime itself. And in this sense, the grenade thrown at Riham Hammoudeh in al-Walid suburb a few days ago, killing her instantly, was the delayed explosion of a time bomb planted in Homs and its countryside in 2011. The “Syrian laboratory” has become specialized in revenge. Today, civilians are being killed just as their counterparts were killed a decade ago, in a vicious cycle of violence fueled by total impunity.
Hammoudeh spent her married life in al-Walid, a suburb originally owned by the former Syrian Ministry of Defense. Her husband, Capt. Nawar Hamidoush, was an army officer with an engineering degree. Under Hafez al-Assad, the military housing system was built to accommodate soldiers and officers near their places of service. Legally, the Ministry of Defense retained ownership of the housing units; army personnel and their families lived in them throughout their service, for up to 30 years, before handing them over to incoming residents.
After the fall of the Assad government and the dissolution of the army, security forces, civilian police and the regime’s Ministry of Defense itself, hundreds of thousands of Syrian families suddenly found themselves forced out of these units. This applied to numerous military suburbs across Syria. These neighborhoods were not, for the most part, sectarian enclaves; on the contrary, they housed Syrians from various regions, religions and ethnicities (including Circassians, for instance, in al-Walid). During the years of mass displacement, they also absorbed families fleeing violence from towns and rural areas across the country.
Not all suburbs fit this pattern. Some were built by the state and then sold to military personnel, who in turn sold them to civilians. This was the case in al-Walid, where several military residents purchased their units and transferred them to their personal ownership through the Military Social Institution — an organization founded in 1970 as the army’s social arm, tasked with providing various services, including housing. The ownership transfer occurred through a notarized contract with the original owner (the Ministry of Defense or an earlier titleholder), followed by registration with the institution. The new owner then received a formal deed, and the unit was listed under their name. Hammoudeh and her husband were homeowners of this type.
After Assad’s fall, residents of these formerly regime-held suburbs and other areas feared revenge attacks by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that led the campaign to overthrow Assad, whether through military operations or arbitrary retaliation. Some families fled back to their ancestral towns; others stayed because they had nowhere else to go.
These remaining families became the first to pay the price for their presence in Homs. On Jan. 4, al-Walid witnessed a targeted shooting in which a father and his son were killed by a fighter, known as Abu Alaa, who sought to seize their home. The slain father had been a warrant officer who retired from the army in 2012. Such incidents became frequent: Dozens of former army officers’ homes in the suburb were seized and their residents forcibly expelled, emptying at least 200 apartments.
In Hammoudeh’s case, testimonies gathered by New Lines indicate that the killing was not a random sectarian attack but a premeditated property grab. The perpetrator had attempted to seize her home weeks earlier and failed. According to local investigations, the direct instigator was the victim’s neighbor. In other words, a dispute between neighbors from different sectarian backgrounds can, in the absence of state authority, turn into an execution order.
According to accounts from the neighborhood, the executioners were relatives of the instigator and wore military uniforms during the killing. But the thread extends beyond the neighbor and the perpetrators. The main instigator, local sources say, is a well-known figure in al-Walid who was a former affiliate of the 4th Division under Assad and has now become a loyalist once again. The latest available information suggests he belongs to one of Homs’ Bedouin tribes.
This preliminary evidence suggests that the crime was not merely “revenge,” but a fully formed model of chaos management, putting unpredictability to use: a neighbor exploiting a security vacuum to eliminate another neighbor; criminals in military uniforms carrying out the killing; and a former regime thug reinventing himself within the new order. It is an unending cycle of violence that consumes ordinary Syrians like Hammoudeh.
Hammoudeh had lived alone for nearly a year while her husband remained detained in Hama Central Prison. A graduate of the Military Engineering Academy in Homs, he is one of more than 30,000 soldiers held without trial in Syria’s prisons under the new government — men from every sect across Syria.
These prisons are scattered across several governorates, including Damascus, Homs, Hama and Tartus. Many detainees are subjected to torture and beatings, including Sunni soldiers who, in an inversion of the old regime’s logic, now face harsher abuse. Previously, Alawite detainees — often leftist, and arrested for political rather than sectarian reasons — suffered severe torture at the hands of Alawite-dominated security branches. Today, the sectarian arrangement has simply flipped.
The forced disappearance of tens of thousands of men had left Hammoudeh — along with some 30,000 other Syrian women, once again from all sects — to face life alone in a deeply traditional society. The absence of a male provider, whether a husband, father or brother, exposes women not only to devastating economic and security vulnerability but also to heightened risk of being targeted for killing and kidnapping.
Once again, the SOHR’s figures reveal this reality: More than 40 women were killed in Syria in 2025, while over 100 were kidnapped — mostly Alawite and Druze. Some returned; others never did. The new Syrian Interior Ministry’s denial that any Alawite or Druze women have been kidnapped is an attempt to absolve itself of responsibility for the grave violations committed against this vulnerable group.
Women are not targeted for demanding their husbands’ release as activists, nor for opposing the new authorities and their loud, derisive online supporters. They are targeted simply because they are the most vulnerable and unprotected segment of Syrian society. Loyalists online insist these are isolated incidents, refusing to recognize their systematic nature.
The women’s vulnerability stems from being alone with their children at a time when neither individual morality nor state laws restrain behavior, and when both society and the state have collapsed simultaneously. What drives the attacks is a radicalized mindset rooted in notions of “female captives,” “infidels” and war spoils. These concepts have been revived by the new regime in a society that has lost its sense of nationalism, citizenship and justice over a decade of war, leaving it receptive to any alternative, even one that contradicts both reason and religious law. To paraphrase China’s Mao Zedong, ideas can become a tremendous material force once embraced by the masses. In Homs, this is painfully evident.
The picture becomes clearer when we recognize that the killing of women is meant to terrorize the entire community — a systematic destruction of a neighborhood’s social fabric and of the intertwined economic and social relationships that once sustained it. The act of killing, then, is not merely a crime; it is an assault on the very possibility of communal solidarity. Hammoudeh was murdered, and Syrian society, including her own Homs community, barely reacted. Calls by activists to restrict motorbike movement or ban face coverings for local security forces led to minimal action. In the days following Hammoudeh’s murder, new killings were recorded in Homs. The rupture between neighborhoods will not last forever, but these communities are returning to a primitive state in which individuals fear their own neighbors. The scene resembles the Homs of 2011, 2012 and 2013.
Impunity and the framing of each crime as a personal dispute or a local quarrel create another mechanism through which gender-based violence is ignored institutionally, despite its visibility. The killings of women cannot be separated from the broader image projected by the new regime, of a hypermasculine society that methodically pushes women out of public life, enforcing their exclusion through violence.
Exclusion does not fall on women alone; it is one element of the model of chaos management in the city, sustained by permanent impunity. What appear to the public as isolated crimes or local disputes are, in reality, the visible surface of a new system of governance, which could be termed the political economy of predation. This has been taking shape since the fall of the Assad regime, with multiple overlapping actors.
At the center of this emerging political economy stands the new regime in Damascus, seeking to consolidate its political and social dominance in Homs, a city long marked by sectarian tension and massacres. Demographic engineering, long attributed to the fallen regime, is now apparently being revived, albeit in reverse. Whether what is happening today is merely the chaos of transition or a long-term demographic strategy is open to debate. What is certain is that the new regime is working hard to cultivate a new loyalist base through visible and invisible patronage.
On the surface, the new regime is selectively enforcing the law against individuals and areas once close to the Assad government, arresting figures suspected of war crimes and seizing their properties. Instead of subjecting these properties to judicial review, it hands them over to commanders and members of armed factions.
The more cunning mechanism lies beyond the surface: the deliberate neglect of problems affecting groups whose loyalty to the new regime is uncertain — Alawites, Christians and Sunnis in certain neighborhoods. This neglect creates fertile ground for violence and unchecked predation. One can point, for example, to the theft of hundreds of water meters from buildings without a single response from local authorities, or to the seizure of privately owned apartments without any legal basis. Those who receive free or almost free housing quickly become loyal clients of the government, just as they once were under Assad. Behind multiple masks, the government is enabling a form of managed revenge, allowing its social base to vent its anger while maintaining overall control, at least for now.
One striking irony is that supporters of the new government insist that weapons should be restricted to the state, even though everyone knows the volume of small arms circulating in Homs is enough to ignite several battlefronts at once. After the Alawites surrendered theirs, they ceased to be the primary holders of weapons. In a widely viewed video last March, a rebel fighter in Talkalakh — near Homs and a border crossing — called for revenge against those who committed crimes under the old regime, arguing that the new state was failing in this duty. Where is the state, then? It is the same state that confiscates weapons in some areas while allowing them to proliferate freely in others.
In these arbitrary confiscation campaigns, Alawites seem to have become, as the local saying goes, “the stick everyone breaks.” Officials, prisoners, teachers, soldiers — all are folded into a single category, known as “the defeated” or “the treacherous others.” Such a reduction makes it easier to strip them of both humanity and property. Sectarianism then becomes the popular, media-friendly fuel that justifies the plunder, recasting it not as a crime but as a “correction of history” and a “righting of past wrongs.”
One of the most dangerous actions taken by the new regime has been the appointment of sheikhs in every state institution. These appointees are typically graduates of Islamic legal institutes and are officially installed through public presidential decrees. Their role is to manage the “deep state” within whatever institution they are assigned to. The authority of the sheikh surpasses that of the institution’s director, who now functions more as a symbolic facade than a genuine administrator with legal powers. In the judiciary, for instance, this structure has made even the public prosecutor effectively dependent on the sheikh’s approval.
The aim of this system is to monitor society as a whole, not merely state institutions — mirroring, in a distorted way, the role once played by Syrian intelligence in public bodies. Yet if security officers previously acted to protect the regime, the sheikh’s mandate goes further: He issues fatwas, adjudicates disputes and wields discretionary authority over virtually any conflict brought before him. Since the sheikh is embedded in a hierarchy whose worldview is rooted in sectarian thinking rather than state law, the result has been widespread abandonment of formal legal channels. Many people simply swallow defeat and humiliation in silence — especially after some returning families presented documents proving ownership of homes they fled, only to be ignored. In effect, the judiciary has transformed into a tool that serves the government and its loyalists, rather than a pathway to justice.
There is no doubt that the new authorities could enforce the law against known violators, including individuals like Abu Alaa, the fighter who killed a father and his son in al-Walid, and others whose identities are widely known. But they choose not to, because such figures are far more useful when intimidating local populations. This complicity is not incidental; it is the policy itself. It conveys a simple message: The law will not protect you. Our power is exercised as we choose.
What is unfolding in Homs is in many ways a result of the absence of transitional justice institutions — those difficult but essential bodies needed to guide communities through the aftermath of conflict. Homs lives under a form of primitive justice, where revenge and chaos replace law. Everyone loses: Sunnis who kill, Alawites who are targeted, women who pay the highest price and a homeland that is disintegrating.
Allowing people to carry out personal vendettas turns society into a second battlefield — one that cannot break the cycle of violence, even if the regime later regains total control through force or persuasion. Bottled-up violence always leaks out again, reappearing in new forms. Moving from the microcosm of Homs to the national level, Syria is witnessing the construction of an entity grounded in sectarian and personal loyalty, as well as an economy of violence and predation. A purely “security solution,” built on deterrence rather than protection, will only produce more victims like Hammoudeh and entrench Syria’s failed-state condition, where militias, criminal networks and quasi-medieval power structures rule.
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