‘My roof was stolen’: Syrian homes looted after gov’t recapture
Drone pictures reveal the extent of the looting of homes left behind after Syrians fled areas captured by government.
Ghassan Hammoud, aged 46, fled Kafr Nabel in southern Idlib province in 2019, as government forces captured opposition-held areas in Syria’s northwest.
He left behind a house he had built a few years earlier, and now lives in a displacement camp near the Turkish border, where he works as a day labourer to look after his seven children and his niece.
Hammoud’s life is hard; he relies on loans for almost half of his monthly expenses and is struggling to cope with abysmal living conditions and cuts to humanitarian aid. But it is what he has recently discovered about his old home, left behind in Kafr Nabel, that upsets him the most.
“I discovered my roof was stolen,” he told Al Jazeera, still in disbelief. After hearing from friends and residents that Syrian government forces had looted abandoned homes, Hammoud had been looking at Google Maps on his phone to view his old neighbourhood.
“Then a friend of mine who passed by the area sent me a picture which confirmed everything,” Hammoud said, his voice trembling. “It makes my blood boil.”
And Hammoud said, he was not the only one with a missing roof.
“I don’t think I was personally targeted; they looted the entire neighbourhood!”
Displaced Syrians who fled southern Idlib and Hama province over the past four years, along with human rights monitors, have accused Syrian government forces of ransacking the ruins of their neighbourhoods and auctioning off agricultural land.
The Syrian government has not commented publicly on the accusations. Al Jazeera has reached out to the Syrian authorities for comment.
Drone pictures obtained by Al Jazeera show hundreds of houses and buildings in southern Idlib province stripped down to their concrete foundations. The glass windows, roofs, aluminium frames, and everything in between are all gone.
Some of the drone pictures show pickup trucks near scrapheaps of metal and bricks. Watchdog groups and monitors have shared photos on the ground of government forces looting not just the foundations of the houses, but washing machines, refrigerators, furniture, and even steel pots and pans. Photos that surfaced on activist pages and on social media show construction workers drilling through homes and mosques to remove their roofs.
Source: AL JAZEERA