The plans, coordinated by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Assad regime’s Ministry of Local Administration and Environment, underline the extent of control the regime continues to exercise over the ostensibly neutral humanitarian program in the country.
An official working on the Assad response, who asked to remain anonymous, said the plans are “not practical and don’t take into account the refugees from eastern Aleppo.” The official added the plan had the potential to “cause social problems due to its inequitable planning priorities.”
East Aleppo made headlines last year, as a months-long siege and savage military and air campaign by the Assad Army, backed by Russian warplanes and Iranian-trained militias, led to a forced evacuation of the last supporters of the armed opposition.
The attacks included air assaults and poison gas attacks on hospitals, schools and food markets, as well as forced deportations.
The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the "Syrian Arab Republic" stated that from July to December 2016, parties to the conflict committed “serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law amounting to war crimes.”
In planning to rebuild and repopulate the city, two parallel processes are now taking place: an internationally-supported humanitarian plan to deal with the needs of Syrians living in, and returning to, east Aleppo; and a much narrower development plan focused on reconstructing the historic Old City at the center of town.
A document outlining the broader, multi-agency humanitarian response, examined by Fox News, specifies suburbs that the Assad regime and the local municipality have earmarked as priorities for returnees.
According to the internal document, the process for deciding on how to rebuild east Aleppo started with the Assad regime outlining 15 priority areas in the city for population returns. These were mapped over 10 UN-designated “Shelter Cluster” priority areas, chosen after the humanitarians assessed the security, practicality of allowing refugees to return, and needs, in each of the areas in the city. The mapping exercise then compared the lists and identified eight areas that appeared on both lists as the focus of rehabilitation resources.
A “multi-sector” pilot project is then identified within three of these neighborhoods, as a further initial target for rebuilding resources.
In fact, even though 52 east Aleppo neighborhoods were returned to Assad regime’s control by the time east Aleppo fell, some of the eight identified neighborhoods defined as priority areas by the regime and included in the UN’s own plans are not in eastern Aleppo at all. They fall instead in the west and center of the city in neighborhoods that were not part of the months-long siege and military campaign in 2016.
A leaked draft of the UN’s Humanitarian Response Plan for 2018 outlines that risks within the shelter cluster include “the potential for aid diversion, corruption and empowerment of parties to the conflict, which should be addressed by all partners through their intervention design, management and monitoring systems.”
The draft goes on to say that rehabilitation plans “must include an understanding of context-specific Housing, Land and Property issues.” These risk assessments and mitigation, intended to ensure UN plans do not contribute to the possibility of displaced persons being permanently forced out of their homes, do not appear to have been factored into Aleppo plans.
Aleppo’s historic Old City has been separated from the broader humanitarian planning process, and is under the supervision of a so-called “National Higher Steering Committee for the Restoration of the Old City of Aleppo.” The most recent meeting of that committee, publicized on Nov. 2 by the Syria Trust for Development, a non-government organization associated with Syria’s first lady, Asma Assad, was hosted by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
In an October report on Aleppo’s new political and social order sponsored by Germany’s Friederich Ebert Foundation, Kheder Khaddour, a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, observed that many east Aleppo neighborhoods were previously populated by “poorer new migrants from the countryside” who continued to identify with their home villages or other parts of the country while working for factory owners, often independent of the regime, who lived in the wealthier western portions of the city.
Those communities have now been savagely disrupted, including their entrepreneurs and, as Khaddour puts it, the conflict “has reshaped the balance of power between Aleppo and the regime in Damascus.” A “new class of war profiteers are the new power network Damascus is using to dominate Aleppo today, and the regime intends to use this network in ruling post-conflict Syria,” he says.
If rehabilitation is truly intended to offer hope and recovery to the displaced populations who now face this social divide, “reconstruction aid should be provided only on the condition that no security restrictions will be placed upon the return of refugees and IDPs, and that independent Syrian technocrats should be involved in the reconstruction process in an oversight function to its spending and management.”
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