Syrians abroad lose their homes to real estate mafia in Qamishli

Hamza Hamki

Jamil Hassan, a Syrian who has lived in Spain for 52 years, received news in mid-April 2017 that an influential merchant known locally as Abu Dalu had seized his shop in the centre of the city of Qamishli in Al-Hasakah Governorate in North Eastern Syria.

The phenomenon of forgery of real estate ownership deeds has spread in various Syrian regions. Jamil Hassan was not aware of this trend, which prompted the authorities in Syria to change the rules regarding the granting of power of attorney to make forgery harder. But these changes are not implemented in North Eastern Syria.  

Over the course of ten months of working on this investigation, we obtained data indicating that between 2015 and 2022 dozens of sales contracts were forged and properties worth millions of dollars were seized in Qamishli. The Council of Christian Churches in the Jazira and the Euphrates estimated in an official document that 70 properties belonging to Syrian Christians living abroad were seized through forgery.

We have examined about 100 judicial documents in cases of forgery and illegal seizure of properties in the city. After matching documents and questioning witnesses, stakeholders, and lawyers, we were able to track three major cases. In two of them, the name of the merchant Abu Dalu appears. He owns hundreds of properties in Qamishli, including dozens whose owners say he seized them in crooked ways.

In all the cases that we tracked, the name of Abu Dalu’s lawyer M. S. appears. Our investigation revealed that these individuals control many properties left behind by Syrians who fled the war, taking advantage of the dual judicial system that has been in force in the region since 2014. 

Judicial labyrinth

It was shocking to Jamil Hassan that his brother kept silent about the sale of his shop with a forged contract on the fourth of December 2011. When he became certain that the shop had been seized, he travelled to the city to retrieve it. According to the real estate registry, the shop is 22 square meters and is located in the Raba'a Al-Qamishli neighbourhood. 

According to Hassan, the documents indicate that Abu Dalu paid the brother $200,000 for his silence. The property is worth about $300,000, as indicated by the testimonies of real estate agencies in the area.

It was not possible to communicate with the brother to respond to the allegations against him because he has been in prison in a European country for about five years. Hassan resorted to the judiciary after failing to reach an amicable agreement with Abu Dalu. He submitted a request to challenge the validity of his signature on the contract and demanded that his signature be compared to the one on the sale document to prove the forgery. 

The court forwarded the notices to his brother's address instead of his address in the village of Hilwet al-Sheikh or his lawyer's office so that Hassan and his lawyer could not obtain the hearing notice.

The dual judicial system in Al-Hasakah governorate facilitates such forgeries and hinders combating them. It is divided between the courts of the Syrian government and the social justice courts of the Autonomous Administration, which has had de facto control over the area since the summer of 2012. Government institutions have continued to maintain real estate records, but the Autonomous Administration has actual control over the region.

In practical terms, Jamil Hassan will not benefit from the favourable government court decisions, except in terms of official records because the property is located in an area controlled by the Autonomous Administration. 

The Autonomous Administration courts do not recognise the judicial rulings issued by Syrian government courts, but it is necessary to deal with the Syrian government's procedures to preserve rights. Jamil Hassan filed a lawsuit with the Autonomous Administration courts, and I was able to obtain its case file as well.  

Document No. 1191 issued by the Cassation Commission in Qamishli on March 17, 2019 shows that the shop must be handed over to the original owner, but the judicial police assigned to receive the shop found it occupied by a tenant who was given 25 days by the court to hand over the property.

Abu Dalo did not give up. He appealed the ruling based on a previous decision issued by the court in August 2018 regarding the mechanism for hiring lawyers.

The decision issued at the time stipulated that Autonomous Administration courts would not accept the transfer of power of attorney from one lawyer to another without documenting it at the Bar Association of the Syrian government or the Autonomous Administration courts. This decision was later modified in October 2018 allowing the court to accept such a power of attorney.  

Jamil Hassan's lawyer appealed the court's last decision. He was shocked that the judiciary would hand over his place to Abu Dalu. As of the writing of this investigative report, the case has not been resolved. 

Forgery game

While tracking the activities of Abu Dalu and his lawyer, we obtained another case file. The victim is the Afram family of Syriac origins. In 2016, Abu Dalu rented a store on the main street in Qamishli from the family of the two brothers, Jack and Joseph Isaac Afram, who have been living with their parents in Sweden for about 30 years.

The rented store is one of five stores, now called Al-Fadil, which occupy the first floor of a building located at the intersection of Al-Sayyid Al-Rais Street and Abi Tammam Street in the centre of the city of Qamishli. The building consists of three residential floors. The area of each floor is 240 square meters. The building also includes a basement that covers the entire area.

Afram family says that Abu Dalu presented two contracts, one bearing a signature claiming to be Jack's signature on April 6, 2022 and the other bearing a signature claiming to be Joseph's signature on April 20, 2021. He took advantage of Jack's presence in the city to present a contract in his name as a seller as well as another contract in Joseph's name at an earlier date when he was on a visit to Syria.

The Afram family claims that the tenant obtained a copy of a previous power of attorney for Jack and his brother Joseph from the Bar Association bearing their real signatures. The tenant then learned how to draw the two signatures and placed them in the sale contracts.

The brothers then filed two separate lawsuits against Abu Dalu accusing him of falsifying the sale contracts. The case is still pending in the criminal court of the Syrian government.

The Autonomous Administration courts also refused to consider the case because it was not resolved in government courts, based on Circular No. 11 in force in these courts.

The Afram family is one of the Syrian-Syriac families residing in Qamishli. The brothers Jack and Joseph left Syria for Scandinavia in the eighties of the last century due to the region’s neglect by the Syrian government. The rest of the family joined them following the military conflict that erupted in 2011.

In 2020, the Autonomous Administration issued a law to form the Absentee Property Committee, a special committee for Christian properties in the region. In the course of the investigation, we tried to contact the Autonomous Administration to inquire about their role in following up on the case of the Afram family and others, but we received no response.

According to the law, whoever covers up or disposes or leases the property of an absentee person without their permission shall be punished with imprisonment for a period not exceeding one year or a fine of no less than 5 million Syrian pounds.

Lawsuit against a deceased person

The third case that I investigated relates to the house of Hagop Aslanian, which was sold without the knowledge or consent of its owner. M.S. the lawyer hired by Abu Dalu in the previous cases worked with a new person whose abbreviation is A.H.

The story began to unfold on November 11, 2012 when the Magistrate Court of the Syrian government issued a decision granting A. H. ownership of a property belonging to the Aslanian family.  The property is located in the Rabaa Al-Qamishli area at the intersection of the Tigris and Euphrates Streets, next to Al-Salam Hospital.

The decision was issued by the court even though the real property owner, Hagop Aslanian, did not attend court proceedings because, according to the case papers, he had died in Aleppo in 1999.

The daughter, Susi, who lives in the United States, hastened to return to Qamishli. The property was returned to the heirs after the sale made by the deceased on March 25, 2014 was nullified, but the lawyer re-filed a new lawsuit against the heirs of Hagop Aslanian.

During the court proceedings, Susi allowed someone to stay in the house under a loan contract in order to preserve the house until the forgery is proven in court and the contract is nullified. 

The same scenario used in Jamil Hassan's first case was utilised here. Court hearing notices were never sent to the heirs. 

According to Susi, out of a feeling of guilt, the person responsible for the court notices personally apologised to her and admitted that he had sent the court notices to the wrong address. 

The house contract, which A. H. presented, dates back to 1998, one year before the death of the father. The question the family asked during our interview was: “Why would the buyer wait for more than 20 years without trying to establish ownership of the property?”

After the court issued its decision in their favour, the Aslanian family sold the property to a new owner who now resides in the property. 

Although the daughter, who is the heir of the Aslanian family, obtained the nullification of the decision granting ownership of the property to A. H. from the Autonomous Administration Courts in 2014, the property remained registered in his name. A. H. later used another trick. He sold the property to four people in a sequential manner with the aim of making it difficult for the Aslanian family to challenge the sales.

Although the Autonomous Administration courts decided to grant the property to the Aslanian family, the case is still pending in Syrian government courts, which has control over official real estate records.

Last October, the buyer was arrested after a court issued a ruling against him in absentia. According to court documents, he was convicted of forgery in the case of the Aslanian family. According to some lawyers we spoke to, he was later released on a bail of three million Syrian pounds.

We contacted Abu Dalu and the lawyer regarding the allegations against them. We sent several messages to the lawyer to respond to the allegations against his client. We called him but he refused to comment and transferred the call to Abu Dalu, the defendant in the first two cases, who happened to be with him during the call. 

We asked Abu Dalu about the cases. His response was that all his procedures were legal. When we confronted him with the denial of the owners and the ruling to invalidate the contracts, he evaded the answer, uttered obscene words, and threatened us. The lawyer, for his part, re-communicated with us, but instead of providing clear answers, he tried to persuade us to refrain from publishing the investigation, and at the end of the call he made veiled threats. 

Once a property is selected, employees of the Syrian government’s municipality in Qamishli and employees of the Real Estate Registry Department in Al-Hasakah are asked to provide information about the property and its owner. Then sale contracts are forged with the help of someone who is proficient at imitating signatures.

According to the testimonies we collected, the imaginary buyer and witnesses get their financial share and the contracts are stamped with official seals provided by employees of Syrian government departments.

Once owners find out that their properties have been illegally seized, they normally resort to the court. The conflicting jurisdictions of various political authorities in Qamishli have made it hard for justice to be served by restoring the rights of owners in the many cases that we investigated. Owners have to deal with a maze in which the rights of civilians are lost. It is a fertile environment for networks of fraud and property theft, in a country that ranks 13^th in the world on the corruption index. 

Supervised by Loujein Haj Youssef - source : Aljazeera.net