By Riham Alkousaa
DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Families of military officers who served under Syria's ousted Bashar al-Assad are being evicted from their subsidised housing at a compound outside Damascus to make way for victorious former rebels and their families, residents and fighters there said.
The Muadamiyat al-Sham compound housing hundreds of people in over a dozen buildings is one of several such areas set aside for officers under Assad's rule.
As the military is being restructured around the former rebel forces, with Assad-era officers demobilised, the evictions from military housing are not a surprise.
But their rapid replacement in the accommodation by fighters who spent years in impoverished, rural rebel-held territory shows the sudden reversal of fortune for supporters of each side in the conflict.
Names of rebel factions under the main victorious Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which captured the capital on Dec. 8, are scrawled in spray paint on the entrances to buildings, apparently marking them out for fighters from each entity.
Three fighters at the compound, four women who have been residing there and a local official providing documents to those leaving said officers' families had been given five days to go.
"We will start moving our children's schools, starting our lives over. I am very sad, my heart is broken, it's our lives, my children's lives," said Budour Makdid, 38, the wife of a former military intelligence officer living in Muadamiyat al-Sham.
Makdid's husband, who has signed papers recognising the new authorities and handed over his gun, has already returned to his family home in Latakia province, a former Assad stronghold, and Makdid and their children would join him there, she said.
Like other families leaving the area, she needed a document from the municipal authorities to say the family was leaving the accommodation and giving permission to remove their belongings.
Local administrator Khalil al-Ahmad, 69, said families had started approaching him several days ago seeking the document and that around 200 requests for one had been made so far.
Ahmad said he had not been officially contacted by the new administration about the change, and was only made aware of it when residents began to ask him for the documents.
A spokesman for HTS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
DISPLACED
Any sign of how Syria's new administration intends to handle former Assad officers, as well as property rights, will be closely watched in a country where millions of people have been displaced since civil war erupted in 2011.
Earlier this month, HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa was filmed requesting the residents of his family's former home in Damascus to leave and allow his own family to move back.
Some former military families living near the Muadamiyat al-Sham compound but not in the subsidised units from which officers are being evicted are also leaving.
Eidye Zaitoun, 52, was packing her belongings into black plastic bags as she prepared to leave her two-room apartment for the coast. She said her son in the military had moved to the coast too and there was no reason for her to stay.
HTS fighters at the compound were not sympathetic.
"We were displaced out of homes, out of our regions on a moonless night with only the clothes we were wearing. Thank God they are now allowed to take out their belongings," one said.