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The first protests in Deraa in March 2011 might have been the spark for the revolution and later the war, but many of these areas, including Basateen al-Razi, had been simmering with socio-economic and sectarian grievances for years.
“It’s important to recognise where the early protest movement started: in the disadvantaged rural areas and these slums, these informal settlements, spreading around the major cities,” explained Leila al-Shami, British-Syrian activist and co-author of a history of Syria’s uprising,
Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.
“The levels of repression in those communities was so much stronger, as well. It was the working-class communities around Damascus that were put under siege very early on… [something that] wasn’t happening in the more middle-class areas.”
Damascus had never really decided what to do with these "slums", but the war changed that. By 2012 and with the help of Decree 66, experts say urban planning had been transformed into a weapon.
It was used to "destroy the homes of opponents, places where the opposition could hide and fight... [and] to get rid of informal settlements without consultants and meetings," Valerie Clerc, a research fellow at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, told IRIN.
Human Rights Watch and the
UN’s International Commission of Inquiry documented deliberate demolitions of hundreds of homes in neighbourhoods around Damascus and Hama between 2012-2013. In one reported but unconfirmed case, governorate officials used land registry documents to mark out the homes of pro-opposition families for destruction. Later, opposition sources allege, land registry offices were destroyed altogether — in some cases deliberately — after pro-government forces retook an area.
The Syrian economy will need revitalising whatever happens next in the conflict. But on the back of Decree 66, reconstruction that might only look like revitalising gentrification to al-Assad loyalists is already being seen as politicised population transfer by his opponents.
Reconstruction was on the agenda at this month’s
Supporting Syria Conference, but the debate has not yet drawn widespread interest. In this vacuum of international attention, areas ravaged by the six-year conflict that have seen mass displacement are increasingly being treated as blank canvases on which government officials, investors, urban planners, intelligence officers, and regime allies can paint their own visions of the future of Syria.
