Last year, Latakia’s Daatour neighborhood had repeatedly been the center of security problems in the city. A series of ex-regime insurgent attacks originated from the neighborhood in January and February 2025, and the neighborhood was the site of the city’s largest massacre of Alawis during the March 6 fighting. However, the neighborhood has calmed significantly since late last year. Local influencers and community leaders work closely with the Ministry of Interior and regular patrols throughout the area have facilitated rapid responses to any criminal activity. Nonetheless, the neighborhood is increasingly facing severe poverty and mass unemployment.
Most of Daatour is technically illegal housing, built by families moving to the city from the countryside over the last half century. As this land was never zoned for real-estate, most houses here remain government property. A ring of government-funded apartment blocks was later built around the informal housing in order to prevent the continued expansion of the neighborhood.
I visited Daatour last month and met with several long-time residents involved in mediation work. Below is a portion of our interviews, as well as some additional background on the neighborhood.
According to the interviewees, 90% of the men in Daatour had been employed in the regime, either as state employees or in the security forces. Of these there are 2,500 former officers alone. The interviewees claim that nearly every single man is now unemployed as a result of the dissolution of the security forces and government layoffs. Economic recovery in the neighborhood is more difficult than in the Alawi villages, as there is no secondary agricultural economy for families to fall back on and the area has very little private sector work.