Mullah regime’s tentacles grabbing Damascene homes

Mullah regime’s tentacles grabbing Damascene homes
“If you were a Syrian citizen living outside Damascus and hadn’t been to the capital city for quite some time, you wouldn’t be able to recognize the places anymore,” says 31-year-old Ahmad, a shop owner from Damascus who asked to keep his last name anonymous. 

“It is not about war, military checkpoints, the increasing number of young, pro-regime men and women wearing fatigues or security agents dressing in casual clothes and posing as peddlers or even beggars; it is rather about the very people  of Damascus,” added Ahmad, whose wife keeps asking him to sell his property and leave the country, as he smilingly continues. 

When Orient Net asked Ahmad, via Skype, for more details concerning those current changes, he spoke about the spawning heavy presence of Iranians and how the newcomers are forming a dominant presence in the historic capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, with much cash intending to lure Damascus’ people to sell their houses.

“It has become very familiar to see Iranian men and women dressed in their traditional black clothes, roaming the streets and buying food. My cousin told me that two of his neighbors in the same building are Iranians! They are paying a lot of cash and those who refuse to sell their houses are at risk of being either intimidated or even abducted by unknown gangs,” says Ahmad.

Interviewing Ahmad helped nail down the facts about the new intended demographic change, which has apparently been taking place for some time under the patronage of Assad’s so-called new cabinet headed by Imad Khamis, a new report by Geroun Network shows.

The report speaks about a loan of 20 billion Syrian Pounds dedicated by Assad’s cabinet to establish a new residential area in Basateen El-Razi, a 1000-hectare residential area located east of Mezzah neighborhood. 

According to many local activists, the suspicious and hugely funded real estate project is believed to be an Iranian scheme that basically targets changing the demography of Damascus, particularly after the original residents of the area were subjected to continuous harassment in order to force them to leave their homes. 

The report also says that residents of the area received eviction notices in June 2015 and were promised to be compensated later, but none of the promises were upheld. 

Al-Laith al-Dimshiqi, a local media activist told Geroun Network that more than 5000 families were forced to leave their houses in the neighborhood, without being provided with alternative housing amid skyrocketing lease prices and a stifling economic crisis that has been storming the country since Assad’s crackdown of peaceful protests in 2011. 

Al-Dimshiqi further stated that many people from Basateen El-Razi were told by some civil servants in Damascus Municipality that the real estate companies, which have construction licenses, are all Iranian.

In the same story, Om Mahmud, a local housewife who was forced to leave her home in Basateen El-Razi, said that all the residents’ efforts to convince people in charge of Damascus Municipality of remaining in their homes came to a deadlock. 

Om Mahmud added that people of the neighborhood joined in a sit-in and stood before the regime’s bulldozers to prevent them from demolishing their houses, but security forces beat them violently and arrested many of them.

The new real estate project in Damascus city, according to many observers and analysts, correlates with the Iranian plans to demographically change Damascus countryside starting with al-Zabadani reaching Darayya and Muadamiyat al-Sham in order to create a new social and political reality. 

However, for many Damascus inhabitants like Ahmad and Om Mahmud, Damascus no longer belongs to them. They feel that they are being uprooted in a systematic way that is cunningly planning to change the real identity of Damascus.

“My house was stolen from me in broad daylight under the sight of the regime’s government. It is the house where I was born and raised. Where shall I go now?” Om Mahmud wondered while speaking to a local media activist.

As for Ahmad, he still refuses his wife’s disgruntled and continuous demands to leave Damascus and sell all his property. He says that he was born in Damascus and is determined to stay in his city although the bad economic situation is making survival harder day after day.

When I asked him whether he, as a skillful Damascene tradesman, will learn Persian to communicate with the newcomers, he commented with a smile that Damascus has through history managed to teach new comers and invaders to speak its own language, and even its dialect.

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