On August 13 a young girl named Hala Qatan was killed in an explosion in Homs’ Abbasiyeh Neighborhood. It was the first death in the mixed-sect neighborhood since December 8, which had otherwise experienced a relative state of stability despite the violence that had engulfed Homs in the first months after Assad’s fall. Both Abbasiyeh and neighboring Zahra stand out as peaceful, lively neighborhoods in a city often described as full of killings and kidnappings. Those familiar with Homs’ history may be surprised by this, given the two neighborhoods’ renown for being centers of regime militia mobilization in 2011 and 2012.
Yet the neighborhoods’ leaders, known as mukhtars, and the new Security Official in charge of this area, Khaled Turkmani, have together worked with the residents and community leaders to maintain a general state of calm and helped return commercial and night life to the neighborhoods. When Mr. Turkmani arrived in Homs a few days after its liberation, he was immediately greeted by Basil Suleiman, the mukhtar of Abbasiyeh. Suleiman did not fear the new authorities, but says he knew the only way to help his community was to coordinate closely with them.
See a previously published interview I conducted with an Alawi woman from Abbasiyeh:
An Alawite Voice From Homs City
Regardless of the official narratives, sectarian tensions at the societal level are very real in post-Assad Syria. The core issue of sectarianism is not about violence or the risk of it, but rather a…
Within the first 24 hours he had already organized a mass handover of weapons from the neighborhood’s residents. When the local settlement process began, he pushed every man in Abbasiyeh to participate. He took Turkmani on a tour within days of his arrival, introducing him to the neighborhood’s people and complex inter-faith fabric.
For his part, Turkmani has insisted on working closely with all communities within his area of control, the city’s ‘Eastern Sector’. He regularly meets with all the eastern neighborhood mukhtars, maintains direct lines of contact with influential activists and religious leaders, and has worked hard to impart a high degree of professionalism and discipline among his general security members. As a result, there are no harassments at his checkpoints and the two neighborhoods’ commercial districts now stay open until nearly 1am each day, with people of all sects traveling from across the city to shop, eat, and relax.
Why then was Hala killed, and does it signify a deterioration of security in these areas?
The underlying crisis across the city can be traced back to the regime’s suppression and expulsion of much of the Sunni community from 2012 until 2017. These series of sieges and cleansing of mostly-Sunni neighborhoods were heavily assisted by Iran and Hezbollah, whose fighters, money, and weapons were key for fueling the regime’s war machine. Amid the violence, many Sunni families were pressured or directly threatened into selling their homes – others simply left everything behind while fleeing the regime’s bombardment.
As these families left Homs, men with connections to the Assad regime were able to access real-estate records in the municipal offices. According to one Alawi activist currently working to return homes to their rightful owners, these regime-affiliated men would take house deeds and forge new names on them, ‘legally’ transferring ownership to new families or landlords.
Then, starting in 2015, Iran began directly paying Shi’i families to move into empty homes or buy property from Sunni families in the Abbasiyeh neighborhood. Iran chose this neighborhood because it had a small Shi’i population already, but it soon ballooned with new immigrants. Once settled, Iran and Hezbollah began to aggressively recruit the men into their militias. The Iranian activity grew so strong that, according to Suleiman, they created their own security zone that neither the regime’s forces nor the local Alawis were allowed to enter. It was from this security zone that Hezbollah and its local affiliates ran their massive drug trade (the mansion of a major Hezbollah drug dealer in the neighborhood now serves as the General Security Headquarters).
Thus, Abbasiyeh turned from a mostly Alawi-Sunni neighborhood into a mostly Shi’i neighborhood, with significant displacement among the Sunni residents. On December 8, as Homs was liberated and Assad fell, nearly every single Shi’i family that had arrived after 2015 fled to Lebanon. In the weeks after, many displaced Sunnis returned, welcomed back by the mukhtar (himself an Alawi) and their Alawi neighbors. According to both the mukhtar and local residents, there are no problems between the two sects here, with both living mixed among each other.
However, both Alawis and Sunnis view the Shi’i population with anger and distrust. For the displaced Sunnis in particular, the Shi’i have become a prime target for housing restitution. Many displaced Sunni families moved into the now empty Shi’i homes upon their return. Others started to harass or attack Alawi and Shi’i families living in their old homes – though this problem is less common in Abbasiyeh. However, many of the Shi’i families have begun returning from Lebanon in the past several months, increasing the number of housing disputes in the neighborhood.
Hala’s murder was a direct result of one of these housing conflicts. According to the mukhtar, Hala’s family, who are Alawi, are living illegally in a house owned by a Shi’i woman who acquired the house after 2015 but since fled to Lebanon. A group of displaced Sunnis who had returned to Homs knew the house was illegally occupied, which made the family vulnerable, and had been harassing them for several weeks to try and force them out. On the night of August 13, one of the harassers threw a sound bomb at the house, the explosion killing the young girl.
More than 80 homes in Abbasiyeh have been sold by Shi’i families in the past three months out of fear of such incidents. According to Mr. Turkmani, the General Security is trying to address the housing conflict, but most of the harassment and threats happen at night and it is difficult to trace the perpetrators. Many of the kidnappings in Homs City have also been linked to housing disputes, with those trying to seize the homes kidnapping those either trying to report the case to the General Security or as a means of intimidation.
Turkmani, neighborhood mukhtars, and activists from all sects have identified housing disputes as the major cause of tension and violence in the city. These problems are not in and of themselves sectarian but often play out along sectarian lines simply by the nature of how the regime and Iran used land rights to disenfranchise Sunnis and rewards their allies. With so many Sunni neighborhoods lying in rubble, the housing pressure for returnees is immense.
The regime’s system of theft via intimidation and document forgery makes housing returns extremely complicated. Security officials and courts try to rely on documents for all housing disputes, but claims of forced land sale, lost deeds, and forged transfers delay these rulings. While Turkmani had himself previously acted as arbitrator, housing disputes in the city are now being resolved in the courts, with the General Security acting only as enforcers of eviction notices.
Homs’ housing disputes are just a microcosm of the broader crisis affecting much of Syria today. The regime’s seizure of housing and farmland dates back decades and has affected every part of Syria, from Damascus to Hasakah to Homs to Latakia. Not just a Sunni-Alawi conflict, the issue of historic land rights is now regularly mentioned by Ismailis and Christians as well, whose communities also had land stolen by Hafez al-Assad. Navigating these disputes will be a long and arduous process for local and central government authorities and inter-communal violence linked to this problem will likely continue for years.
Nevertheless, the work of men like Khaled Turkmani, the neighborhood mukhtars, and local influential religious and activist leaders has so far been largely successful in preventing wider violence. In communities where these figures have coordinated closely, most disputes have been resolved long before resorting to violence. The new government would do well to learn from these experiences and expand its cooperation with local civil society groups and community leaders in other parts of Homs and the country.