Damascus, Syria (AP) – Many Syrian Arawy religious minority A few days after thousands of members are attacked by armed factions of the Syrian pro-government who beat, arrested and ordered their homes to be evacuated, thousands of members leave the outskirts of Damascus, where they live in wild homes.
Muslim minority groups were considered privileged under the control of the Alawite Assad family, but ever since. Bashar Assad The government collapsed at the end of last year, and its members fear revenge from the country’s Sunni majority.
Government officials later said there were no such eviction orders, but many residents of Sumarya packed their belongings into trucks and left the house, fearing further attacks.
Failure to break
This incident shows how sensitive the situation is Syria Almost nine months after Assad He was exiled by a rebel attackends 50 years of control of his family.
United Nations spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said on Friday that UN officials “contain reports of development threats and reports of abuse of innocent civilians, including women and children.”
Assad was a member of the Alawis minority, and at his time Alawis was disproportionately represented by the Security and Intelligence Televisions. The Sumarya area, northwest of Damascus, once contained military housing, including members of the 4th Armored Division.
When Assad fell, most of the members of the 4th Division fled the area. But civilian families also lived there, many who built small, ridiculous, one-storey homes.
Mohammad Ibrahim, a retired government worker, told the Associated Press on Saturday that he bought the small house in 2010, and was later determined by a court decision to decide the ownership.
“The walls, when you hit them, they break, the doors are the same. It’s the housing for the most basic level of living,” he said.
The threat of eviction
A Syrian report, a publication tracking the country’s economy, said that Sumarya appeared on land expropriated from the town of Moadamiyat al-Sham in the 1980s. “Many current residents have no official documents proof of ownership or lease, making them vulnerable to sudden evictions,” he said.
But even those with documents said they were threatened and ordered to evacuate.
Raghdajerawa, the mother of the two who live in one of the small houses in Sumarya and the government official, said the residents were told on Thursday they would come to check their owned papers.
“We were preparing the paper and we thought it was, so no one would bother us,” she said. “The next day I went to work and my husband called me and they came in and beat him and beat my son.
Jelawa said an armed man told residents that he had to leave within 48 hours. Some men were rounded up to sign documents giving up on the house, detained, beaten and forced, she said.
Karam Khuzam, head of the Neighborhood Commission, said security officials had notified them that residents would be issued an eviction order for illegally constructed homes that they did not have their own papers.
He said there was a court order in 2004 to legalize the ownership of the land in Sumarya, but after Assad’s collapse, some of the original landowners of Moadamiyat al-Sham said that those who bought the homes in Sumarya no longer had legal status. However, instead of legal proceedings to determine ownership, the armed man ordered residents to descend to the neighbourhood and leave immediately.
“There were some violations – be-hit people, insulting them, arresting random arrests. Some people attacked women,” Kutham said.
He said that members of the Neighborhood Committee later spoke with government officials and were told to stay in their homes unless they received an official eviction order from the governor.
The threat continues
Even after it was said there was no official eviction order, residents said members of local armed facts led by a man known as Abu Huzaifa continued to intimidate them. Many families were too scared to stay and seize opportunities.
Many recall the violence that erupted on Syrian coasts a few months before clashes between security forces and armed groups of pro-Assad, caught up in a revenge attack on the sect that had hundreds of Alawian civilians killed, spiraled into a spontaneous conflict between security forces and armed groups.
Jellawa’s family was preparing to pack their modest belongings into trucks on Saturday to take them to the coastal area of Latakia, but Jellawa feared leaving Damascus would be a loss of work.
“Who do we complain? Where are the nations? We’ve removed the old regime, and what are we now?” she said. “That’s not a problem anymore…Let them kill us, we’ll be relieved.”
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Sewell reported from Beirut. Omar Sanadiki, a journalist for the Associated Press in Damascus, contributed to the report.
