Top officers from Syria’s now-defunct Republican Guard were the first to leave after Bashar al-Assad was ousted.
“They fled as soon as the regime collapsed. They’re responsible for destroying Syria,” said Abu Yassin, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) coordinator for the barracks in Qudsayya near Damascus.
Yassin is charged with making sure no one occupies the abandoned flats without permission or loots them.
Many other residents are packing up and leaving the barracks, but low-ranking soldiers often don’t have the means to do so and hope to stay – even though they are coming under increasing pressure to move.
“After 12 years of civil war there is a lot of hatred here for those who collaborated with the regime,” says FRANCE 24’s senior reporter James André, reporting from Qudsayya.
Millions of other former state employees are now in the same position. In the security services alone, “that’s 1.2 million people who have basically been kicked out of their jobs and are not being paid and that’s been going on now for over a month,” Andre said. “There is a large mass of people right now who have no money in a country that is in a very deep economic crisis.”
Syria’s new leadership says it plans to reintegrate some former state employees, but questions remain over who should be reemployed and what to do with those who are not.
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