DAMASCUS (Dispatches) -- Early one evening in late January, 12 masked men stormed the Damascus home of Um Hassan’s family, pointed AK-47 assault rifles in their faces and ordered them to leave.
When they presented ownership documents, the men arrested Um Hassan’s oldest brother and said they could only have him back once they had moved out. The family surrendered the house 24 hours later and picked him up, battered and bruised, from the local General Security Service headquarters, said Um Hassan, giving only her nickname for fear of reprisals.
Her family is part of Syria’s minority Alawite community. Their story is not unique.
Since Abu Muhammad Jolani seized power in December, hundreds of Alawites have been forced from their private homes in Damascus by his HTS forces, according to Syrian officials, Alawite leaders, human rights groups and 12 people with similar accounts who spoke to Reuters.
“We’re definitely not talking about independent incidents. We are talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of cases of evictions,” said Bassam Alahmad, executive director of human rights group Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ).
The mass evictions of Alawites from privately owned homes have not been previously reported.
They now accuse supporters of Jolani, who once ran an Al-Qaeda affiliate, of systematically abusing them as payback.
In March, hundreds of Alawites were killed in Syria’s western coastal region and sectarian violence spread to Damascus in apparent retribution for a deadly ambush.
Two HTS officials said thousands of people had been kicked out of homes in Damascus since Assad was toppled by Sharaa’s rebel force, with the majority being Alawites.
The officials said most resided in government housing associated with their jobs in state institutions and, since they were no longer employed, they had lost their right to stay.
But hundreds more, like Um Hassan, were evicted from their privately owned homes simply because they are Alawites, Reuters interviews with multiple officials and victims show.
Alawites fear the evictions are part of systematic sectarian score settling by Syria’s new rulers.
An official who declined to be named at the Damascus Countryside Directorate, which is responsible for managing public services, said they had received hundreds of complaints from people who had been violently evicted.
An Alawite mayor in a Damascus suburb, who also asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, said in March that 250 families out of 2,000 there had been evicted.
The mayor shared with Reuters a call recorded in March with someone claiming to be a member of the General Security Service (GSS), a new agency made up of takfiri terrorists who ousted Assad.
The GSS official demanded the mayor find an empty house for a family relocating from the north. When the mayor said there were no apartments for rent, the official told him to, “empty one of those houses that belong to one of those pigs”, referring to Alawites.
According to three senior GSS officials, the new authorities have established two committees to manage properties belonging to individuals perceived to be connected to the previous government. One committee is responsible for confiscations, the other addresses complaints, the people said.
The committees were created as Jolani’s forces closed in on Damascus in December and were modeled on a similar entity known as the “War Spoils Committee” in his former stronghold Idlib, the GSS sources said.
On April 16, STJ filed a complaint with the Damascus Suburbs Directorate, calling for an end to “sectarian-motivated” property violations and the return of looted properties.
Fabrice Balanche, a Syria expert and an associate professor at the