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In a crumbling police building in Syria's city of Hama, a young man wearing a face mask and baseball cap fires questions at a middle-aged man. “Name?” he asks. “Military number?” The former regime army reservist rolls the answers off the tongue by heart as the young man scribbles the information on a regimented form.
This is one of the so-called “reconciliation centres” set up by Syria’s new authorities, led by former Al Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS). Here people who worked for, or were associated with, the former government receive new temporary identity cards, confirming that they have officially cut ties with the toppled regime. “Defection Card” is printed in large letters at the top of each one.
The process, according to HTS officials, aims to protect people affiliated with the former regime from retaliatory attacks, following the collapse of more than 50 years of Assad family rule in Syria on December 8, when rebel forces took the capital Damascus and former president Bashar Al Assad fled to Russia. It remains unclear exactly how many people have officially defected countrywide. In Hama, between 1,600 and 2,000 have done so, according to HTS workers at the centre.
“A large number of people are coming to us, about 200 a day,” the centre’s director, Abu Turab, tells The National from a dimly lit second-floor office. He describes how his team has received regime soldiers, state employees, pro-government thugs and militias known as shabiha and the Local Defence Committees respectively, as well as members of the Baath party, to which the Assad family belonged.
“We bring the person in, photograph them, so we can give them an ID, we save the details on the laptop so that we have a copy,” he adds. Next to him, a young employee transfers each person's information from an Excel spreadsheet to a Word document template on a single laptop, before printing out an identification card and laminating it.
Downstairs, young workers carry out each step of the process, ushering in small batches of nervous-looking men from a long queue outside. Outside, a fighter in a balaclava loads weapons received from former soldiers into a pick-up truck – Abu Turab says they will be taken to military storage warehouses and eventually redistributed to a new army, when it is formed.
Under Bashar Al Assad, Syria had a bloated state, employing hundreds of thousands of people in inefficient jobs where low salaries drove widespread demands for bribes from civilians requesting basic government services. Quitting without permission was a criminal offence for government employees. Young men were also conscripted into the army, often forced to stay on longer than the mandatory maximum of 21 months after a brutal government crackdown on protests in 2011 spiralled into civil war. Another aim of the centres is to enable state employees to return to their old jobs, as part of a process of building a new Syrian bureaucracy.
“Bringing in new staff would take a long time to learn, much longer than bringing back the former employees,” Abu Turab says. “But things will be more correct than they were in the past. Before, there were bribes, we will try to correct them.”
Not everyone attending the centre agreed with the former regime – an indication of the complex fear in Syrian society. Many did not like Mr Al Assad but kept quiet and got on with their jobs to retain a salary or avoid potentially fatal punishment.
Queuing outside the police building, Mohammed Darwish, 27, describes how he was forced to serve six years in the regime army on a monthly salary of 300,000 Syrian pounds (about $22). A Sunni Muslim, he says soldiers from the Alawite minority, to which the Assad family belongs, were given preferential treatment, including better food and more lenient conditions. “We were just given guns, they were given guns and ammunition,” he tells The National. After a dispute with his commander, as a punishment, Mr Darwish was sent to the front lines in Deir Ezzor, where ISIS was operating.
Anas Al Hamid, 48, served 29 years as a police officer, despite the regime bombing his own home in village of Taybet Al Imam north of Hama because of a rebel presence. He tried to defect in 2012, but was caught by regime authorities. “They told me, ‘either you go back to work, or you will go to prison and not come out,’” he says.
The reconciliation centres – spread across all Syrian provinces now under HTS control – do not aim to determine who committed crimes under the former regime. Detailed evidence shows that Mr Al Assad’s security forces carried out widespread torture, killings and indiscriminate bombings of civilian areas.
“We have had senior commanders come in, generals,” says Abu Turab. “Everyone claims they didn’t kill, that they had defected already. This sort of chat doesn’t concern us, what’s important for us is to give them these cards to protect people. And whoever’s hands have been stained with Syrians’ blood, or has committed crimes, there is a court – at the end of the day, the court will hold them to account.”
Anyone making false claims about not having a role in atrocities won’t get off lightly, Abu Turab insisted.
“The truth is that if they are lying, then this card won’t protect them.”
Nor is it exactly clear how long the cards will serve a purpose. “They are temporary until we finish the reconciliation processes and the situation stabilises,” the director adds. The cards are not a guarantee that revenge attacks won’t happen: in recent days there have been reports of rebel forces burning and looting homes of Alawites.
HTS is advertising for new recruits into the security forces, to contain widespread theft and to avoid a security vacuum. In Homs city, a poster pinned to a wall called for men between the ages of 20 and 30, no shorter than 168cm tall and free of evidence of involvement in crimes, to scan a QR code to sign up, although it remains unclear how many people have done so.
But employees of a new state want better salaries. That is a huge financing duty facing Syria’s new authorities, which also face the mammoth task of rebuilding the country’s broken infrastructure.
“I would go back if they paid me more,” says Rammah Nahlain, 37, a former police driver from Hama and a father of four currently on a salary of 400,000 Syrian pounds a month ($30). “I need at least three million pounds a month. We just want to be able to live in our homes, and provide for our families.”
