Lubna Labaad walked among a flattened wasteland that was once her neighbors’ homes.
The only building left standing was a mosque, a years-old message scrawled on its outer wall from when rebels surrendered control of the area to the Syrian regime during the country’s brutal civil war: “Forgive us, oh martyrs.”
Now, many former residents of the Qaboun neighborhood in the capital, Damascus — like Ms. Labaad, her husband, Da’aas, and their 8-year-old son — are trying to come back. After the 13-year war ended suddenly with the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in December, the frozen front lines dividing the country melted away overnight.
“We were waiting for that very moment to return,” said Ms. Labaad, 26.
Their home is still standing but was stripped of pipes, sinks and even electrical outlets by a soldier who neighbors said had squatted there for years with his family. Still, the Labaads are luckier than many others who have returned to find nothing but rubble.
Syria’s conflict forced more than 13 million people to flee, in what the United Nations called one of the largest displacement crises in the world. More than six million Syrians left the country and some seven million have been displaced inside Syria, including Ms. Labaad and her family.
In an interview in January, Syria’s interim president, Ahmed Al-Shara, said he was confident that within two years millions of Syrians would come back from abroad. But the war went on for so long that people had established new lives away from their hometowns.
It is not clear exactly how many people have returned so far. Many have come back to see what happened with homes and hometowns, but the decision to return permanently is not an easy one, especially if there is nothing to come back to. Many others have opted to stay put for the time being, including in camps in Turkey and Jordan that have yet to empty out, as they watch what happens in Syria.
An estimated 328,000 homes in Syria have either been destroyed or severely damaged, according to a 2022 U.N. report, and between 600,000 and one million homes are either moderately or lightly damaged. The analysis was done before a devastating earthquake hit parts of northwestern Syria in 2023 that caused the collapse of still more buildings and damage to others.
The government’s housing ministry did not respond to questions about whether or how it planned to help in the country’s reconstruction. The government is grappling with a host of challenges after Mr. al-Assad’s downfall, from a security vacuum to an economy in chaos to Israel’s incursion into parts of southern Syria.
And recent unrest that has left hundreds dead in the country’s coastal region — many of them civilians killed by forces aligned with the government, according to a war monitor — is raising the specter of spiraling sectarian violence.
Even for those who have returned home, the joy has been dulled by the damage already done. People are having to search to find their long tucked-away house keys “and are coming back and not finding their homes,” said Mr. Labaad, 33.
The day after Mr. al-Assad was ousted in early December, the Labaads wasted no time catching a ride with friends from Idlib, in Syria’s northwest, back to the neighborhood they had fled in 2017. But more than three months later they are still not settled.
On a recent day, Mr. Labaad installed a lock on the front door of the family’s home, which for weeks had been secured with a long metal wire through the keyhole. The soldier who had been living in their apartment stripped everything from the third-floor apartment except for sparkly blue lettering on the wall, reading “Ahmad.” The Labaads think it may be the name of the soldier’s son.
“If we had money we could fix it right away,” Ms. Labaad said. “But we don’t.”
Mr. Labaad used to work day jobs when they lived in Idlib. Back in their hometown, he has started working in security with the new government. But he and his fellow security officers have not received salaries yet.
On a nearby street, Khulood al-Sagheer, 50, had come back with her daughter and granddaughter to see the state of their house. They found only one wall left standing.
“I will put up a tent and sleep here,” Ms. al-Sagheer said, vowing to rebuild. “The important thing is that I return to my home.”
Others have also chosen to live in their homes, no matter how damaged. For months, Samir Jaloot, 54, has been sleeping on a thin mattress and two blankets in the corner of the only intact room of what was his late brother’s apartment in the Yarmouk Camp neighborhood of Damascus. Next to his makeshift bed sits a small wood stove and gas kettle.
The window is still broken, but he has repaired two gaping holes in the wall, most likely caused by tank shells, he said. The walls are pockmarked with bullet holes. He has slowly been making repairs, clearing out the rubble and debris and trying to erect new walls so that his wife and five children can join him.
The partially destroyed apartment sits on the second floor of his family’s four-story building in Yarmouk Camp, named because it began as a camp for Palestinian refugees who fled their homes during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s establishment. The Syrian war reduced the building to just a floor and a half.
Around the neighborhood is a sea of gray buildings with missing floors, roofs and walls. Most homes were looted long ago, and the only thing seemingly left in every exposed room is more gray rubble.
“This is the house I got married in; my kids were born here,” Mr. Jaloot said of the building, his clothing covered in dust and splotches of cement. “I have good memories here. My dad lived with me; my mother lived with me.”
Standing nearby was his cousin, Aghyad Jaloot, 41, an aeronautical engineer with a trim salt and pepper beard who had just days earlier come to visit from Sweden, where he and his family had resettled. He craned his neck toward the sky. “This sun is worth all of Europe,” he said.
His former neighbor now living in Canada called him recently and told him he planned to return. So did two other neighbors, one who fled to Lebanon and another within Syria.
Now, Mr. Jaloot wants to come back, too.
“If I don’t return and others don’t return, who’s going to rebuild this country?” he asked.
