This Is How the Assad Regime Stole $1.5 Billion Worth of Detainees’ Property

The Assad regime was not satisfied with arresting Syrians, tying their freedom, and torturing them to death in its prisons, but also confiscated their property and stripped them of their assets and money in various legal and illegal ways.

Recently, a report published by The Guardian in cooperation with the Association of Detainees and The Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) exposed how the Assad regime exploited the suffering of Syrian detainees accused of joining the protests against it for financial gain.

The report shows how the property of Syrian detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime has been a target of the intelligence services for 11 years, an artery that generates millions of dollars for its military machine, and a way to circumvent international sanctions.

The report also provided a comprehensive overview of the treatment of Syrian detainees from the moment of their arrest until their release, based on an investigative investigation that included 801 detainees, highlighting the reasons for detention and the widespread use of torture, charges, sentences, trial procedures, and the means by which the detainees were released.

 

Asset Seizure

The ADMSP, a human rights group, revealed that the Assad regime confiscated funds and property belonging to former prisoners and forcibly missing persons estimated at $1.5 billion from 2011 to 2021, according to The Guardian in its report on 08 April 2022.

The ADMSP report indicated that the assets seized by the regime include financial balances, real estate, companies, cars, and materials, such as jewelry, electronic appliances and equipment, agricultural crops, livestock and poultry.

It also indicated that the property was estimated at $1.5 billion based on information gathered from interviews conducted by the ADMSP with former detainees who were stripped of their land, property and financial assets through court orders and other official decisions.

The ADMSP estimates that nearly 40% of detainees after the Syrian revolution in 2011 were subjected to confiscation of their property, as the report was based on an approximate number linked to at least 250 thousand detainees during that period.

The true figure is likely to be higher because the report's findings indicate that the majority of the assets were informally confiscated.

The report indicates that the confiscated funds, according to the official methods verified by several mechanisms, exceed half of Syria's budget for the year 2021.

In addition to punishing opponents and their families, the ADMSP attributed the reasons for confiscating property and funds to the fact that the regime, which is suffering from a severe economic crisis, in addition to international economic sanctions, had to search for other sources of funding, including financial extortion of detainees' families, corporate takeover and capital control.

The steady rise in the confiscation of detainees' assets is the latest in a series of desperate measures that the Assad regime has resorted to for its financial steadfastness and to combat the effects of sanctions, as well as ensuring that no property remains in the name of the former detainees, who are now living in exile.

In addition, the ADMSP issued warnings and advice to all families of detainees, forcibly missing persons to take steps to protect their property and inheritance from the confiscation processes followed by the regime, in addition to appealing to international organizations to intervene.

In turn, Mr. Diab Serriya, Co-Founder of the ADMSP, explained in a statement to Al-Estiklal that “this report exposes the depth of the Assad regime's corruption and the harsh tactics it uses to survive the terrible economic crisis, and to destroy the lives of detainees long after they leave prison,” noting that the regime has followed two methods in the context of confiscating the property of detainees and forcibly missing persons.

“The first method, which is considered official, is issuing judicial rulings against the detainees and convicting them of engaging in anti-government activity, and this is done through the Terrorism Cases Court in Damascus or the Military Field Court, which allows the regime to permanently strip the detainees of all their civil rights and confiscate all their property,” he said.

“As for the second method, which is considered unofficial, it depends on the regime's intelligence seizing any property, money, or everything related to the detainee, specifically at the moment of his arrest, for example, confiscation of his car, property of his house, money in his possession, all of these confiscations are not recorded and are considered as a form of punishment for the detainees,” Mr. Serriya added.

He pointed out that “there is no solution or deterrent to the regime that prevents it from forcing the detainee to give up his property by forcing him to give up, because the case is covered by a complex legal framework that makes it difficult to return any confiscations at the present time.”

“The Assad regime's confiscation of the property of the Syrians opposed to it reshaped Syria anew, given that most of the people whose property was confiscated are from areas previously associated with the Syrian revolution, such as the countryside of Damascus, Homs and Aleppo,” Mr. Serriya said.

 

Systematic Policy

Also, former detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime recounted that they lost their homes and businesses and became poor upon their release from the prisons of the Assad regime, pointing out that the regime's harsh tactics are part of its systematic policy.

The Guardian quoted Muhammad Kafr Jomi, a former detainee from Idlib, as saying that he spent 8 years in illegal detention and was subjected to torture that left him physically disabled, stressing that the regime had seized a factory and his family's home.

Osama Sheikh Hamed, a former officer in the regime forces who was arrested in June 2011 for refusing to order his forces to open fire on civilians in the village of Jisr al-Shughur, stated that he was tortured for 3 years in Sednaya prison, then discovered that he lost everything he owned upon his release.

In turn, Ahmed Hassan Al-Hajj, a former detainee from the countryside of Aleppo, accused the Assad regime of confiscating a house and lands planted with olive and pistachio trees that he owned before his arrest, noting that the regime took everything so that no one would return to the country.

All of the former detainees and others in interviews with the ADMSP confirmed that they were forced to sign convictions against them while they were blindfolded, after being tried on terrorism-related charges for participating in the protests, and did not know that they or their families had been forced to give up their civil rights and everything they owned.

In a report issued at the beginning of 2021, the ADMSP exposed the Assad regime's exploitation of the file of detainees and forcibly missing persons, and its use as a means of reaping and accumulating wealth and increasing the influence of the security services, their leaders, the influential in its government, and some judges and lawyers.

Based on 508 interviews conducted by the ADMSP in its report with former detainees and families of forcibly missing persons from the fall of 2018 until the end of 2020, it was found that they paid more than $2.7 million to obtain information about a detainee or based on promises to visit him or release him.

The ADMSP estimated that the financial extortion operations since 2011 have deposited nearly $900 million into the coffers of the Assad regime or those close to it.

A report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) documented about 131,469 people, including 3,621 children and 8,037 women, who have been detained since 2011 at the hands of the Assad regime.

The network’s report issued in late 2021 confirmed that these numbers represent only the minimum number of incidents of arbitrary arrest and enforced disappearance that they were able to document, because of the families’ refusal to document the news of their sons’ arrest, fearing that they would be subjected to greater torture, and a loss of trust and hope regarding the feasibility of documentation.

 

Arbitrary and Illegal Decisions

The confiscation of property is not limited to detainees, as this is a consistent strategy followed by the Assad regime with its opponents in general, as punishment for their participation in or support for the protests, and it even threatened with it those who failed to perform compulsory service in its military forces.

In February 2021, the head of the allowance and exemption branch in the Syrian regime forces, Brigadier General Elias Bitar, announced that “the General Recruitment Directorate will confiscate the money and property of anyone who reaches the age of 42, whether inside or outside Syria, in the event that he does not perform military service or does not pay a financial compensation for its loss, if the concerned person fails to pay, his property or the property of his family will be seized.

Brig. Gen. Bitar stated that every taxpayer or citizen, even if he is over 42 years old, must pay about $8,000 for missing military service, in addition to a fine of $200 for each year of delay starting on the day following the expiry of the deadline for payment.

The executive detention is based on a letter from the Recruitment Directorate - not through the judiciary - and it is a violation of the Syrian law itself.

This decision will provide the regime’s treasury with huge sums of money, as well as more restrictions on opponents of the regime who pushed their children to flee outside the country or fled with them to avoid serving in the regime’s army.

The previous law was preceded by several exceptional laws that violate the property rights of the Syrian people as a whole, most notably Law No. 10 issued in April 2018, which is the first measure the regime is working on to control Syrian property.

This law allows the regime to exploit the absence of Syrians and the loss of their ownership papers and to seize their property in ways that are considered arbitrary and illegal according to local and international legal bodies.

The Voice of the Capital website, which specializes in the affairs of Damascus and its countryside, said in mid-June 2021 that “the regime forces have confiscated houses, shops and farms in the countryside of Damascus owned by people opposed to the Assad regime.”

“A state security patrol toured the town of Ain Tarma in Damascus countryside, and confiscated 10 houses, 6 shops, two farms and a wedding hall,” it said.

“The Assad regime's terrorism court issued a decision to confiscate the property of 20 people from the town of Yalda, south of Damascus, some of them are detained in Sednaya Military Prison, and others are forcibly displaced towards northern Syria,” the website also confirmed.

Observers believe that the aforementioned confirms that “Bashar al-Assad's regime seeks to fund its bankrupt treasury, and at the same time destroy its opponents by stripping them of their rights in their country and robbing them of their land and homes as a form of punishment.”