Adnan Azzam has his work cut out: Every room in his second-floor apartment in the old city of Homs in Syria bears the scars of war. There is a shell hole in the corner of the children’s bedroom and drawers are missing from the cabinets in the ornate salon, chopped up for firewood by the rebels who occupied the apartment and did their cooking on the stairwell, leaving scorch marks on the whitewashed wall.
On the street outside, a poster warns returning residents to beware if they come across any of the many kinds of munitions and weapons — mortar bombs, rockets, grenades — that were used in the vicious battle for Syria’s third-largest city and the “capital” of the revolution that tried, but has so far failed to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“Keep away, do not touch and inform others if you see any of these,” the poster urges.
Azzam is among the few people to have come back to the city’s Christian quarter since a deal brokered by Iran allowed rebel fighters to leave, along with a handful of non-combatants who survived the two-year siege.
The May deal was a microcosm of how the Syrian conflict is being managed in its fourth year: 900 rebels were allowed out, with their guns, to fight another day, while elsewhere, the war goes on.
“My apartment is in better condition than many others,” said Azzam, a retired engineer, who fled to a nearby village in early 2012.
“The fighters usually lived on the ground floor in case they were bombed. This used to be a nice neighborhood. Both sides are to blame. Now people are coming to clean up their homes and clear out the rubbish, but the government can’t afford to pay for all the damage. Maybe they are waiting for international aid? And I can’t bring my family back yet,” he said.
Still, milestones of recovery are being marked. Last month, the first wedding since what al-Assad loyalists call the liberation was celebrated in the quarter’s 1st century Syriac Orthodox church, Umm al-Zennar. Also, a nearby Ottoman-era restaurant called Bayt al-Agha was open for business during the FIFA World Cup in Brazil in June and last month, despite its distinctive black and white stone structure being half-destroyed.
However, after dark, the alleyways are eerily deserted — it will be many years before the city starts to look picturesque again.
By day, the scale of the destruction in Homs is shocking. Buildings are battered and pockmarked, and floors pancaked on top of each other. There are only dark, charred spaces where windows used to be. Slogans scrawled on walls tell fragments of the story: “Welcome the people of jihad,” reads one, while others advertise al-Farouq — one of the first brigades of the Free Syrian Army, the mainstream rebel alliance.
In the moonscape of the Bab Hud neighborhood, on the frontline by the Homs Citadel, a commander signed himself Issam Abu al-Mout, a nom de guerre that is a chilling reference to a man boasting of facing death.
Images of victory are plastered everywhere. On a blackened, skeletal structure opposite the Khalid ibn al-Walid mosque, a long banner of al-Assad, in sober suit rather than his favored camouflage commando chic, flutters in the wind.
“Together we will rebuild,” it proclaims.
Bulldozers have started to clear gaps in the rubble. Cheerful street art — part of a “Homs in my heart” campaign — brightens up the dusty, dun-colored view.
In Damascus, the Syrian Ministry of Information, which controls visas and access for foreign media, is keen to approve trips to Homs, where developments broadly fit the official grand narrative of a return to normality, stability and the start of reconstruction — and of course the victory claimed by al-Assad.
The Syrian government’s control is not in doubt. The drive from the capital to Homs is longer than in pre-war days because of a detour required to avoid snipers on the main road and there are maddeningly frequent checkpoints where bored soldiers demand IDs and search vehicles. To the north, toward Aleppo and areas held by the jihadist forces of the Islamic State militant group, artillery fire can be heard.
Homs is not entirely safe. In Wadi Dahab, a densely populated Alawite area of the city, fresh rubble marks the sites of recent car bombings — one of them claimed by al-Nusra Front, the homegrown Syrian jihadist group which has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda. Shopkeepers have placed oil drums on the pavement to try to put some distance between themselves and any blast.
Baba Amr, the rebel-held suburb where journalists Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik were killed by government rocket fire in February 2012, is devastated and looks eerily deserted. A militia roadblock bars access.
Yet other parts of the city are in surprisingly good shape. In Inshaat, where rows of gleaming white UN vehicles clog the car park of a state-run five-star hotel, the streets are clean and orderly, restaurants bustling for the Ramadan Iftar meal.
No one knows exactly how many Homs residents have fled abroad or are displaced in Syria, but last month, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees still counted more than 352,000 people from the city registered as refugees, the majority of whom are in Lebanon — one-quarter to one-fifth of the city’s prewar population.
Rumors abound of abandoned properties in pro-opposition areas being taken over by Alawite loyalists and looting by the widely disliked, Iranian-trained Syrian National Defence Army. Statistics are not available.
Opposition activists now living elsewhere reject the Syrian government’s upbeat narrative.
“Homs is a city of horror,” said Razan, whose Sunni family was involved in the mass protests of April 2011 and suffered in the subsequent Syrian army offensive and repression.
“If there had been a real solution, people would be able to go back, but hundreds are still in prison. The government is removing some checkpoints and trying to show that everything is fine, but it’s crazy how they’ve managed to cover it all up and brainwash people just by saying: ‘Let’s move on,’” Razan said.
Samer, a wealthy businessman, put it bluntly: “The whole thing is designed to snuff out the rebellion.”
At al-Waer, a couple of kilometers to the west, a war of sorts continues. Like other rebel-held areas across Syria, it is still under siege. The top apartments of tower blocks are burned out, hit by government artillery taking out snipers. Yet it is a mostly static and curiously intimate sort of conflict. Residents, including state employees, commute in and out of the suburb every day to work or study, passing army and rebel roadblocks. Negotiations on the terms of access, and perhaps another eventual evacuation deal, are continuing sporadically.
“It’s hard, especially for the children, and the main worry is their psychological welfare,” said Afra, a law student, glancing warily at the uniformed security officer loitering nearby as she describes the situation inside. “As an adult you can cope, but the little ones don’t understand what’s happening. They are afraid of sudden noises and if a door slams they jump.”
Omar, a middle-aged shop owner, said the fighters in al-Waer are Syrians, many of them locals — not the foreigners who are vilified in state media — and mostly keep themselves to themselves.
“Two days ago they started shooting at each other. When that happens it’s scary and we want the army to go in. We are tired. I bought a new house and it’s lost its value. We want to get this over with,” he said.
That sense of weariness is widely shared, in Homs and beyond.
“I used to go to work every day and hear the sound of snipers’ bullets,” said Samar, an Alawite official in the Homs education department.
In 2012, she and her family moved to an apartment further from the old city, but still in range of rebel mortars.
“The worst thing was the fear of kidnapping,” Samar said. “Sometimes we didn’t take out the garbage for days for fear of being in the street, but things are much better now.”
Anas, her daughter, describes being forced to wear a hijab as anti-regime protests swelled in the heyday of Syria’s bloody Arab Spring. Yet there is also a determination to look ahead and to try to accentuate the positive.
“At one point, this did become a sectarian conflict,” said Nazem Kanawati, another Christian who has moved back home to old Homs and is doing his bit for the cleanup campaign.
“But, look, the mosque is closer to my home than the church. It is part of my heritage too. Remember, Europe was completely destroyed after the second World War and it was able to recover. I feel there is a bright future ahead. The wounds of war can be healed,” he said.
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