Return to the city of death and destruction
Displaced residents of Homs come home to a place they hardly recognize after three years of war
AMMAN, Jordan — Hundreds of Syrians streamed into the city they once called home Friday to see for the first time the apocalyptic destruction wreaked on Homs during two years of siege.
Returning to their neighbourhood one day after the Syrian military regained control of their city, residents found a ghost town of destroyed buildings and the remnants of their old lives.
During three years of heavy fighting and suffocating blockades, the streets and homes in the “capital of the revolution,” where people had rallied against the government in 2011, had been pulverized to rubble and dust.
Unable to succeed with a ground invasion for several years, government troops pummelled this rebel enclave with artillery and air power.
Civilians trapped inside the districts had cowered in basements hoping they would withstand the impacts of bombs. Doctors used rudimentary tools, operating with no electricity and unable to bring in medicine, to try to save the lives of the casualties that piled into the field hospitals. But still hundreds had died.
Under a deal struck this week, the government assumed control of these old quarters, allowing the remaining 2,000 insurgents to leave for other rebel- held towns.
The final piece of the agreement fell into place Friday afternoon as the last 300 or so rebels left Homs in green public buses.
Even before the last ones departed, government bulldozers were clearing paths through the heaviest rubble.
Talal Barazi, the governor of Homs, said engineering units were combing Hamidiyeh and other parts of the old quarters in search of mines and other explosives. State TV said two soldiers were killed while dismantling a bomb.
Troops discovered two field hospitals in the neighbourhoods of Bab Houd and Qarabis, as well as a network of underground tunnels linking the districts to each other and to the countryside.
Slowly, curious residents started to trickle back. By late afternoon, hundreds of men, women and children were walking around, some struggling over the potholed, stone- strewn streets. Many stopped to take pictures on their cellphones, wandering down paths carved out of rubble. Almost nothing was left of Old Homs; a strip of rubble and cavernous holes where the MiG planes struck. Facades had been blown away. Few of the buildings that still stood had all of their supporting walls. And in among the rubble was the debris of former lives: bedsheets, clothes, children’s toys, a kitchen sink.
In the mostly Christian district of Hamidiyeh, Huda, 45, found nothing where her house once stood but a pile of rubble and a lone cup from her coffee service. She and her husband dug through the rubble. “I came to check on my house, but I couldn’t find it. I didn’t find a roof, I didn’t find walls. I only found this coffee cup, which I will take with me as a souvenir,” she said.