Rebuilding will cost $200b and could take over 15 years
Work has slowly begun to rebuild but giant swathes of the country have been reduced to piles of rubble
“The regime is telling the world: ‘We won, get over it. Either help us or you will suffer with outflows of radicals and refugees’”.
Steven Heydemann | Non-resident senior fellow at Brookings
In the Syrian city of Homs’ landmark Clock Square, where some of the first antigovernment protests erupted in 2011, stands a giant poster of a smiling President Bashar Al Assad waving his right arm, with a caption that reads: “Together we will rebuild.”
Four years after the military brought most of the city back under Al Assad’s control, the government launched its first big reconstruction effort in Homs earlier this year, planning to erect hundreds of apartment buildings in three neighbourhoods in the devastated centre of the city.
It is a small start to the massive task of rebuilding Syria, where seven years of war, air strikes and barrel bombs have left entire cities and infrastructure a landscape of rubble.
The government estimates reconstruction will cost some $200 billion (Dh734 billion) and last 15 years.
Government workers have also begun clearing rubble from Daraya, one of the many Damascus suburbs wrecked by a long siege, to begin reconstruction. The government can cover $8 billion to $13 billion of the reconstruction costs, according to the Cabinet’s economic adviser, Abdul Qadir Azzouz.
Recent AP drone footage from Daraya outside Damascus and the city of Aleppo in the north shows scenes of destruction reminiscent of Second World War devastation.
East Aleppo, home to nearly 1.5 million before the war, is still largely empty and in ruins a year after it was recaptured from rebels. Small-scale renovation of government buildings and historical sites has barely begun to scratch the surface.
In eastern Ghouta — an area with a pre-war population of some 400,000 — the United Nations did an assessment of satellite imagery from six of its seven districts and found more than 6,600 damaged buildings, more than 1,100 of which were destroyed. And that was before the latest government offensive, which has levelled even more homes and structures.
For reconstruction overall, the Syrian government is trying to scrape together financing from Syrian businessmen and expatriates as well as international allies.
It has also imposed a 0.5 per cent reconstruction tax on some items, including restaurant bills.
The Homs project gives an indication of the scale of the task.
The plan focuses on three of the city’s most destroyed districts — Baba Amr, Sultanieh and Jobar — and will rebuild 465 buildings, able to house 75,000 people, at a cost of $4 billion, according to Homs’ governor, Talal Al Barrazi.
It was not immediately clear how many housing units that entails — meaning individual apartments — but assuming there is on average five people per household, that would be around 15,000 units.
Worst destruction
That’s under half of the 35,000 housing units that were estimated to have been destroyed in Homs.
And it’s a small fraction of the 1 million housing units Al Barrazi said Syria will need.
Homs saw some of the worst destruction of the war as government forces for months blasted the string of neighbourhoods in the city’s centre that were held by rebels.
For the past four years, any rebuilding has largely been the work of individuals, with some help from the UN.
In the devastated Khaldiyeh district, carpenters were fixing the windows and doors of Mohammad Bayraqdar’s charred apartment.
The walls inside — even the chandeliers — were still blackened from the fighting years ago.
The 38-year-old coffee vendor fled Khaldiyeh in 2011 and moved to his in-laws in a governmentcontrolled part of the city. Late last year he informed the municipality that he wanted to return home. Once government architects checked that the building was suitable for living, repair work began with the help of a UN rebuilding programme.
“Everyone should return to his home, even if it means living in one room only,” said Bayraqdar, standing on the roof overlooking a vista of flattened buildings.
Outside Damascus, Daraya was left an empty ruin after all its population was removed in a deal last year that ended a destructive and gruelling siege by Al Assad’s military.
The suburb once had a population of 300,000 and was famous for its furniture, textiles, wood and vineyards, which produced some of Syria’s best grapes.
“Almost all houses, factories, stores in Daraya remain skeletons,” said Daraya’s mayor, Marwan Obeid.
He estimated rebuilding infrastructure alone will cost $160 million to $200 million. The government has so far allocated $70 million.
The plan, he said, is to start moving some 100,000 people back into the less damaged half of Daraya.
The rest of the community, however, is too ruined. Obeid said it was not known how long that will take to rebuild.