Syria: Government admits refugees’ homes are in the hands of fraudsters and networks linked to intelligence services
This investigation reveals that Syrian intelligence networks have used fraud to steal properties. The fraudsters are militia members and employees linked to the 4th Armoured Division led by Maher al-Assad, brother of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. In one of the largest acts of property theft, they fraudulently changed the property register to obtain ownership of houses whose owners reside outside of Syria.
This investigation reveals that Syrian intelligence networks have used fraud to steal properties. The fraudsters are militia members and employees linked to the 4th Armoured Division led by Maher al-Assad, brother of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. In one of the largest acts of property theft, they fraudulently changed the property register to obtain ownership of houses whose owners reside outside of Syria.
In a damp, unlit, underground cellar sit stacks of files containing documents recording legal complaints made by Syrian families who have lost their homes and properties in the capital, Damascus, and the surrounding region, over the last ten years.
These families did not lose their homes and properties, often representing their life’s savings—to bombings or military operations, but to fraud operations in which the names of the original owners have been replaced in property deeds and registers with the names of new owners and occupants.
Adnan (43), a Syrian lawyer, is going through the files, which sit on dusty metal shelves in this closed vault belonging to the Palace of Justice.
Like other lawyers representing clients both in Syria and abroad, he mostly has to work by the light of his mobile phone because the electricity is disconnected. He is checking through the legal proceedings and related documentation to work out which loopholes the fraudsters have exploited in order to deprive hundreds of owners, forced by the war to flee abroad, of their properties.
Although armed battles between Syrian regime forces and the armed opposition are now a thing of the past, leaving the regime in control of Damascus and the surrounding Rif Dimashq region, battles of a different, post-war, kind are raging between Syrian refugees living abroad and between the property fraudsters in Damascus, Rif Dimashq, and in other areas.
The fraudsters take advantage of the rightful owners’ absence, as well as the slow pace of litigation proceedings in cases where they are brought to trial. They are experienced in falsifying documents, and work with lawyers, notaries, state employees and owners of real estate companies. In most cases the beneficiaries are intelligence agents or employees, or otherwise linked to the security services, or officers or military personnel, including some linked to the 4th Armoured Division led by Maher al-Assad, brother of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. These details have been uncovered by this investigative report produced collaboratively by Siraj unit, The Day After media in Istanbul, the Guardian, and Daraj.com.
“These are the main figures in the fraud operations, and each has a different role to play” says a Syrian lawyer who has been observing the phenomenon up close.
Last August, Muhammad Usama Burhan, head of the Damascus suburban regional branch of the Lawyers’ Union, revealed in statements to the press that a number of lawyers had been arrested for forging powers of attorney for property sales, as well as other powers of attorney, notably in the name of persons residing abroad. Addressing the subject of corrupt lawyers, former head of the Syrian Lawyers’ Union, Nizar al-Sakif, stated that the number of lawyers had decreased from 28,000 to 25,000 after the dismissal of many lawyers for “acts unbefitting the legal profession, including forgery.”
The Syrian Ministry of Justice has previously admitted that the forgery of property deeds has become a distinct phenomenon, and asked notaries to pay careful attention to powers of attorney presented to them.
Judge Anwar Majni, a member of the Syrian Constitutional Committee, explains that numerous factors have contributed to the growth of the property theft-by-forgery phenomenon. Absentee property owners are left unable to defend their property rights because granting power of attorney to a lawyer requires security clearance, which is not granted to opponents of the regime. Meanwhile, corruption and cronyism have increased, particularly in the wake of the economic turndown which has seen employees’ salaries fall to less than 150,000 Syrian lira (20 USD).
In Damascus, there are cases where owners have gone to court to recover their homes dating from March 2011 up to mid-2022, but the rate of forgeries has increased in the last two years. In the first half of 2022, the Palace of Justice recorded 125 victims of property fraud in the greater Damascus region who had initiated legal proceedings after discovering that they had been defrauded of their properties while abroad, according to figures compiled by Adnan, the lawyer, who sees this as an indicator of the alarming increase in the influence of the fraudsters and their backers.
He attributes the phenomenon to “[the fact that] property owners have left the country or been forced to flee, or died, and the challenging economic and cost-of-living situation.”
Most cases of fraud do not reach the courts. In some cases, owners overseas are not aware of what is happening to their properties; in others they are unable to appoint lawyers to act on their behalf due to financial constraints or security-related issues, such as the need to obtain security clearance in order to hire a lawyer. In other cases owners may no longer be alive.
Refugees and displaced people who lose their property to fraud, and are not actively wanted by the Syrian regime for reasons related to the revolution or dissidence, are obliged to seek out a local lawyer immediately to begin the process of recovery, though it can take a decade for cases to make their way through the courts. Meanwhile, anyone who is wanted by the regime will struggle to recover stolen property in the courts. “No lawyer will dare to work with you, out of fear of arrest and imprisonment.” This is what happened in the case of five Syrian families who lost their homes, and who live in Turkey, Lebanon, and European countries such as Sweden and France.
Dreams become nightmares
Abdullah (31 years old, not his real name) had hopes of making a good sum when he sold the house he’d inherited from his father, who lost his life in the vaults of the Air Force intelligence services after being arrested in 2013. A photo of his father was amongst the ‘Caesar photographs’ smuggled out by a former officer, says Abdullah.
The young man’s dream became a nightmare when he lost his home in Jdeidat Artouz, Rif Dimashq governorate, to a fraud operation he describes as “systematic.”
Abdullah, who now lives with his family in Istanbul, says: “I tried to appoint a lawyer to pursue the case, but they all refused, partly because I was wanted by the security services for my activities against the Syrian regime, and partly because the defendant was linked to the Fourth Division. They refused because they feared any lawyer representing me would themself face trumped-up charges.”
As a result, “my home was taken from me by a relative of mine with links to the Ghayth Forces militia, part of the Fourth Division, by means of a legal case filed at the court of Qatana, in Rif Dimashq, in mid-December 2018, in which he produced a forged contract of sale purporting to show that I had sold the house to him in 2013 and received payment in full.”
The wartime circumstances have also helped nourish the phenomenon of forgery, particularly in cases where owners have lost title deeds. Judge Anwar Majni says that “the destruction and violence of the Syrian conflict have contributed to the loss of records and important official documents including court registers, title deeds and other legal records.”
He says that “a high proportion of homes are informal dwellings, so land registers do not reflect the reality of ownership, making it easier to commit forgery and usurpation of real property.”
His argument is supported by the results of a survey of over 10,000 displaced people conducted by The Day After media, which showed that only a third of those who had been forced to leave their homes during the conflict possessed documents proving ownership of their properties. This prompted the organisation to collaborate with lawyers and local communities to survey over two million official documents, a third of them title deeds, relating to the properties of refugees and displaced people.
Corruption facilitates forgery
This comes at a time when the Syrian regime is pressing ahead with a raft of controversial new laws on property ownership. These include Law 10, which allows areas to be opened up for urban development in regions from which original residents have been displaced, such as Qabun, Eastern Ghouta, and others. They also include Law 3 on the removal of the remains of destroyed houses, which according to rights organisations contains numerous violations of property rights directed at refugees who may be unable to prove ownership.
Syrian doctor Iman (35, name has been changed for reasons of security) lost her home in the Damascene suburb of Qudsaya not to air raids or military incursions, like many other Syrians, but to a carefully planned fraud operation.
She purchased her house in late 2016 for 400,000,000 Syrian lira (100,000 USD) and registered it in her name before making plans to rent it out because she wanted to go abroad.
Five months later, she moved to Istanbul with her husband, who was being followed as he was wanted for military service.
Iman explains that she returned to Syria in November 2021 to visit family and check up on the house, only to discover that the tenant now owned the house and possessed an ownership document in his name.
Looking visibly stunned, she recounts: “When I asked him to vacate the apartment because I wanted to rent it out to a new tenant, he waved a court ruling in my face showing that the house now belonged to him.”
“I was dumbfounded,” she adds. “He told me, ‘You sold me the house by way of a power of attorney from Istanbul in your name.”
Despite Iman’s repeated assurances that the tenant obtained a forged power of attorney, and that she never visited the Syrian consulate in Istanbul, she explains that the power of attorney produced by the forger was official and notarized, meaning the sale was final and could not be reversed, she tells the investigation team.
She says: “The tenant who fraudulently obtained ownership of my property works as a low-ranking employee at one of the military recruitment centres in Damascus, and has good relationships and acquaintances in real estate and security. He now works in fraud.”
To this day, Syria represents one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, with more than 13 million people either forced to flee abroad or displaced internally up to March 2022, according to statistics from the UN High Commission for Refugees.
Threatened at gunpoint
Jdeidat Artouz, al-Dimas, al-Mazzeh and Eastern Ghouta are areas of Fourth Division control and influence, via a security council led by the highest-ranking military or security official in the area.
Syrian families who spoke with the investigation team revealed the involvement of officers and militia figures working for the Fourth Division, who had forged ownership of their properties and registered them in their own names. This is what happened to Abu Hassaan (59), who lost his 140sqm home in Jdeidat al-Wadi, a Syrian town approximately 15km from Damascus city centre that is one of the region’s best-loved holiday and day-trip destinations.
He owned a furniture-making workshop and bought a home in 2010, paying the cost (100,000 USD) in full via a sale and purchase contract which was not registered in the land registry of the Rif Dimashq property courts.
He moved in and remained in the property until 2012, but was forced by the fighting and bombing witnessed in the region to seek refuge, along with his family, in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2014. He says: “After buying the home from the heirs, I was not able to submit a claim to prove the sale of the property and have it recorded in the property register, so I don’t have a ‘green tabu’ title deed. The purchase was made with an outright sale contract. Then I rented out the home for three years to a family, but I recently discovered that the person living in the house was a man from Homs, a senior officer in the Fourth Division with the rank of ‘ra’id’, and this had taken place without my consent or even knowledge of how he’d come to enter the house and be living there.”
He goes on: “The officer threatened the person who had sold me the house at gunpoint, and forced him to register my home in his own name and conclude the document in full.”
Abd al-Nasir Hawshan, a lawyer and member of the Free Syrian Lawyers in Hama, links the fraud and forgery operations to networks and individuals connected to the Fourth Division, as the economic and security arm and the gateway through which many economic projects are misappropriated.
Joseph Daher, faculty member at the European University Institute, says: “There are different dynamics going on in the exploitation of the state of chaos brought about by the war; property usurpation continues apace because property is a prime resource for the accumulation of wealth by militias and regime-linked businessmen, who take advantage of the fact so many Syrians have gone abroad, leaving behind their homes, and are unable to return for political reasons.”
Forging victims’ identity documents
Fraudsters exploit the absence of property owners, whether they have gone abroad or died, here the first step in the journey of forging ownership and taking over the property begins [sic].
The records of court cases brought to recover stolen properties, which were examined by the investigation team, revealed details of the fraud process and the techniques used. These included using forged notaries’ stamps as well as forging personal identification data, which involves the fraud networks forging identity or residence documents bearing the information of the owner who is being targeted, and then proceeding to transfer ownership.
Using this method, a network of fraudsters from Sahnaya in Rif Dimashq was able to sell a property to another party in 2015, exploiting the absence of the rightful owner abroad, after producing a forged residence document in her name, according to records of the court case.
Hawshan, the lawyer, confirms that fraud operations in areas under regime control are usually carried out by powerful military or security figures. He says “more than twenty networks have been uncovered in Hama, Aleppo, Damascus and Latakia, with the numbers of people involved ranging from 40 to 50.”
The investigating team contacted the Syrian government and Ministry of Justice to allow them the right of reply, but received no response.
The best known types of forgery
The fraud networks change the name of the owner in the property register, thus changing the name of the real owner; next, a statement of property registration or title deed is produced, which enables the fraud network to carry out a sale. The forgery can be produced by transferring stamps from regular powers of attorney to false powers of attorney using a scanner.
The lawyer may arrange a contract of sale between two parties on the grounds they are seller and buyer, and bring a claim to prove the sale of the property before a judge, after which the proof of the sale between the seller’s agent and the buyer is recorded, and the court ruling enacted—based on forged contracts—in favour of the (fraudulent) buyer.
The use of forged notary stamps or the forgery of personal identification information—where the fraud networks produce a forged identity or residence document carrying the details of the property owner being targeted, and a photo of one of the members of the fraud network, which is then used to produce a power of attorney and thereby transfer ownership [sic].
The title deed, which is obtained upon registration of a property, in the owner’s name, in the government property register, is considered the strongest form of real estate ownership documentation in Syria. There are other official documents which are used secondarily, such as a property sale deed with an irrevocable power of attorney, which is the strongest of these in that it requires the seller and buyer to attend the property register in person. In cases where the buyer does not attend in person, the buyer must bring a court case against the seller to prove that he has paid the price of the property and is its rightful owner” [sic].
