Title: Discriminatory Real Estate Policies Against Syrian Kurds
Publisher: Syrians for Truth and Justice
Release date: 2021

Several laws, legislative decrees, executive instructions and circulars have been issued over the past decades to regulate issues of ownership in Syria’s border areas. Each of these legislations required Syrian citizens to obtain license/security clearance/permits if they wanted to purchase real estate in specified regions.
While these legislations are themselves flawed in multiple ways we will discuss in this report, importantly, they have been criticized for not adopting clear and indiscriminate standards of implementation. These laws distinguish between one Syrian region and another and, practically, are enforced differently from one person to the next. Recognizing this flaw in implementation, some might suggest that the solution for these legislations is to indiscriminately implement them across all Syrians, regardless of regional, personal, or factional distinctions. However, we discuss in this report that even if the laws were equitably applied to all Syrians, they would not be just. With the unfair implementation of these legislations, the government exacerbated social fractures on the basis of national and area-based discrimination for decades. This report describes how these real estate legislations primarily affected Syria’s Kurdish population, and in doing so, contributed to a discriminatory system which led to feelings of oppression among Syria’s Kurds.
In the following paper, we will provide an overview of the legislations in question, their purpose, their legality, their practical application, and how successive governments used them exclusively against the Kurds. Afterwards, we will offer recommendations on how to address their negative impacts and prevent similar discriminatory policies in the future.[1]