Thanassis Cambanis

Photo: JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty Images

[Published in Foreign Policy.]

HOMS, Syria — More than four years of relentless shelling and shooting have ravaged beyond recognition this city, which once served as the symbolic capital of the revolution.

The buildings hang in tatters, concrete floors collapsed like sandcastles, twisted reinforced metal bars and window frames creaking in the wind like weather vanes. The only humans are occasional military guards, huddling in the foundations of stripped buildings. Deep trenches have been dug in thoroughfares to expose rebel tunnels. Everywhere the guts of buildings and homes face the street, their private contents slowly melting in the elements. Ten-foot weeds have erupted through the concrete.

As far as the government of Syria is concerned, the war in Homs is over. Rebel factions were defeated more than a year ago in the Old City, and the last holdouts, who carried on the revolt from the suburb of al-Waer, signed a cease-fire agreement this month. A few weeks before Christmas, busloads of fighters quit al-Waer for rebel-held villages to the north, under what the Syrian government and the United Nations hailed as abreakthrough cease-fire agreement to bring peace to one of the Syrian war’s most symbolic battlefields.

Gov. Talal al-Barazi, an energetic Assad-supporting Sunni, has been instrumental in pushing the cease-fires in Homs’s Old City and recently in al-Waer district. But almost none of the pro-uprising Sunnis who once filled its center have returned, and at times he seems to be presiding over a graveyard — an epic ruin destined to join Hiroshima, Dresden, and Stalingrad in the historical lexicon of siege and destruction.

By the end of a two-year siege of the Old City, the entire population of about 200,000 had fled, and more than 70 percent of the buildings in the area were destroyed. Today, according to the Syrian government, less than one-third of those who left have returned to the Homs area — but the ravaged city center is largely uninhabitable. Barazi said the cost of physically rebuilding the city would be enormous; without help from Russia, Iran, China, and other international donors, he said, full reconstruction would be impossible. Experts estimate it will cost upwards of $200 billion to rebuild across the entire country, or three times the country’s pre-war GDP. 

And yet the Syrian government hopes to turn this shattered city into a symbol of its resurgent fortunes. Authorities showcase the reconstruction of Homs to spread a clear message: They intend to regain full control of the country. If they can tame Homs, a Sunni city where the majority of people actively embraced the revolt, they can do it anywhere.

There’s another more menacing message in the Homs settlement, however, as the neighborhoods that wholeheartedly sided with the revolution were entirely destroyed and have been left to collapse after the government’s victory. Almost no Sunnis have been allowed to return. Displaced supporters of the revolt from Homs understand that this is the regime’s second wave of punishment — they might never be allowed to go home.

This is the Homs model from the regime’s perspective: surround and besiege rebel-held areas until the price is so high that any surviving fighters surrender. The destruction left behind serves as a deterrent for others. Supporters of the government say that fear of a repeat of the ravaging of Homs is one major reason why militias around Damascus, like Zahran Alloush’s Army of Islam, have largely kept their indiscriminate shelling of the city center to a minimum.

The rebels, of course, take a different lesson: Assad will annihilate any opposition he can, unless the rebels fight hard and long enough to win, secure an enclave, or, at the very least, force the government to allow safe passage to another rebel-held area. Only force can extract concessions from the state.

A recent visit to Homs laid bare the deep divisions in the city and the near-impossibility of restoring what existed there before: a majority Sunni, but markedly mixed, community, more conservative and provincial than Damascus, but one that managed to successfully coexist despite profound communal differences.

As I stood in the middle of Khaldieh’s main square, in the center of Old Homs, I could recognize the bones of a familiar cityscape. Storefronts and five-story apartment blocks surrounded me. Avenues led in six directions from the roundabout.

I had seen this place before in video footage, when it played host to popular protests and later guerrilla fighting, and still later to a relentless barrage of Syrian government artillery intended to bludgeon all resistance. What remains today is an obliterated landscape that would be worthy of a dystopian sci-fi flick, if it weren’t so real.

The only sound, the ubiquitous sound, is the whistle of the wind, as loud as in the desert but incongruous in the heart of an ancient urban core.

My government minder fell silent after pointing out now-vanished landmarks. As we prepared to leave the square, she gestured dejectedly. “You can’t rebuild this,” she said.

The desolation continued for blocks in every direction, only abating up the hill toward Hamidiyeh, a mixed neighborhood to which a few dozen families, some Sunni, some Christian, have returned.

A bicycle parked outside a bombed schoolhouse is the only sign that you have reached the re-inhabited part of Khaldieh. Two boys kicked a soccer ball in a narrow courtyard delineated by rubble and broken walls. They pointed us in the direction of Maamoun Street, which begins at a grand Ottoman-era house, with a fountain and interior courtyard. One window had been refashioned into a sniper’s nest, a car frame shoved into the window.

Abdulatif Tawfik al-Attar, 64, is one of the few Sunnis to have returned to the Old City, the historic district near the center of Homs. Perhaps he was trusted by the government because of his outspoken criticism of the rebels, whom he said “came and destroyed everything.”

Now Attar is slowly rebuilding his shattered life. His wife and daughter live in a rented apartment on the outskirts of Homs while he restores their home to livable condition, room by room. Before the war, he worked as a mechanic at a government refinery. Now he repairs bicycles in his entryway.

He cherishes what he considers his ample blessings. All three of his children survived the war, he still draws a government salary, and the walls of his home are still standing. “For me, the situation could be far worse,” he said.

A chatty man who dropped out of high school for his first job, Attar finds it difficult to sit still. He’s ready to brew tea on a portable burner hooked to a car battery or prepare a water pipe for guests who like to smoke. But in the Old City, hardly anybody drops by to visit, except for a middle-aged neighbor also painstaking reconstructing his house.

“It is lonely here sometimes,” Attar admitted. He apologized for the spartan conditions in his home. His son invited the family to join him in Saudi Arabia, but Attar said he wasn’t interested. “I love my country,” he said. “I don’t want to live anywhere else.”

Quietly, he began to cry. “We have lost a lot in Syria, especially in Homs,” he said. “We didn’t used to have women begging outside the mosques.”

After a moment he said, “Homs will be back.”

The local Ministry of Information official charged with supervising journalists in Homs, an Alawite who also hails from the city, began to cry as well. One of her sons died fighting for the government in Daraa; her husband and remaining two sons are still on active duty in the military.

“We have lost so much,” she agreed, fingering the gold pendant she wears around her neck engraved with her slain son’s portrait. “Even our own children.”

Attar squeezed the official’s arm to comfort her. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “No one dies before it is written. People run away from the war to escape death, and they die in the sea. People went on the hajj, and 800 died in a stampede.”

One day the war in the rest of Syria will come to an end, they said, as it has in Homs — but if Syria is to recover, it will have to transcend the sectarian divisions exacerbated by the war.

“Those men who have hurt us have hurt themselves, too,” Attar said. “God knows what everyone has done. Human beings make mistakes.”

The minder quoted a saying she attributed to former President Hafez al-Assad, father of Syria’s current leader: “Religion is for God, and the nation is for everyone.”

“That’s how we grew up,” she said. “If you live in a country with government, land, home, you want to forgive so that you don’t lose everything.”

These pro-government Homs residents expressed nostalgia for a version of coexistence that worked for them. But the Assad government so far has offered rebels few options beyond submission and surrender — nothing that looks like increased rights for the majority of citizens. Homs Gov. Barazi, for instance, argues that as the city limps back to life, people will return, including Sunnis who might have sympathized with the uprising.

“Between Christmas and New Year’s, you will see a new Old Homs,” Barazi said, in an interview on the sidelines of a conference in Damascus about how to reboot the Syrian economy. “Once the shops open, you will see the things go back to life.”

He said the occasional car bomb or shell that strikes Homs didn’t threaten the city’s overall security. “It’s much safer in Homs than in Damascus,” he said.

Many government supporters don’t like the cease-fires that Barazi has championed, especially because they allow some fighters to flee and continue fighting elsewhere. The recent deal in al-Waer allows those rebels who surrender their heavy weapons to remain and govern their neighborhood. Activists suspect the government might round up rebels and dissidents later.

His strategy is to start with quick anchor projects in the worst-hit parts of Old Homs: rebuilding schools, historic places of worship like the Notre Dame de la Ceinture Church and the Khalid ibn al-Walid Mosque, and now 400 stalls in the old marketplace. He is counting on Russia, China, and Iran to foot the bill of what will be an enormously expensive project. He estimates that maybe one-third of the displaced residents from Old Homs have returned to the city, if not yet to their original homes.

Several Christian parochial schools reopened this fall in the Hamidiyeh quarter of Old Homs. About 200 students came to the first day of school, out of a pre-war enrollment of 4,000 in the neighborhood, according to Father Antonios, a priest who helps run the Ghassanieh School. At pickup time, parents said they still didn’t feel safe in their old neighborhood. “We’re doing a lot of work to reassure people,” the priest said.

The government’s strategy overlooks the daunting, practical obstacles to resuscitating a city as thoroughly ravaged as Homs. It also ignores the bitter feelings of the people who supported the revolution and will never reconcile themselves to Assad’s rule.

Homs might yet be a model, but perhaps not the one intended by Syrian government officials — it might end up as this war’s lasting symbol of ethnic cleansing or urban siege war without restraint. The government’s showcase plan doesn’t make room for the legions of Homs natives who rose up demanding rights from a government that systematically tortures its citizens and allows them no say over how they’re governed. Anti-government activists also say that Sunnis are systematically denied permission to return to the Old City because authorities suspect that a reconstituted Homs will continue to act as a bastion of resistance.

“People still support the revolution,” said a retired resident, who never left Homs throughout the war. The resident spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of government retribution against his family members.

Homs proved the futility of expecting the Syrian government to reform, this resident said. He lamented how it responded to peaceful protests with lethal force and indiscriminate arrests and torture.

“For six months, no one carried so much as a knife. When the regime began killing them, they defended themselves,” the resident said. “I’m so sad about Syria. I stopped thinking about the future a long time ago. I live one day at a time.”

Periodically during the siege of al-Waer district, this resident smuggled in food and meat to civilians. With like-minded friends, the resident cheered advances of the rebel Free Syrian Army on battlefronts around the country. Today, the resident said, depression has set in, with the government precariously in charge of a city that once felt like the first liberated place in Syria.

“I feel like I will explode,” the resident said. “All these people died, in every possible way, for what? I can’t believe that everything will finish and Bashar al-Assad will still be president. I would rather die.”