It used to be a school. The blackboards are still there, though they have gaping holes in their centres, and the ground is loaded with dirt and rubble.
This is where a single father and his nine children have made their home, beside the famous 13th-century Khalid ibn al-Walid Mosque in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city. They cook in a room missing its outer wall, and wash in a hidden space in another, with water from jerrycans.
“I feel safe here being next to the mosque,” says the father, who does not give his name. Before this, the family stayed in a shelter, but, he says, it “was full of people ... I have young daughters and I was afraid to leave them alone.”
The man is a construction worker, who recalls being imprisoned underground by regime forces “for four months and eight days”.
The school is daubed with slogans associated with Hizbullah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group which supported Bashar al-Assad’s regime during Syria’s war and was accused of gross atrocities. Locals say Hizbullah used the school as some sort of centre.
“The situation is unlivable but ... at least [the family] live in dignity,” says Mohamed Subih Daher (40), the co-ordinator of an initiative called Homs Is Our City. He met them while collecting data around his neighbourhood of Khaldiyeh, a former opposition stronghold once under siege by the regime in the early years of Syria’s long war, which began with a revolution in 2011 and evolved into suppression and civil conflict. Assad fled to Russia in December.
Now, Daher wants to help with reconstruction. Needs include everything from asphalting and testing the foundations of bombed buildings to scanning for explosives and other war remnants. Efforts to clear rubble are already under way.
“We couldn’t do any fixing up and clearing under the regime, there was a campaign of forcing people not to come back ... They had a plan to change the demography of the city,” says Daher, who stayed in Homs all of this time. Only two new aid organisations – one of them international – came to offer help since the fall of Assad’s regime, he says.
Daher himself “hid” for years to avoid doing military service for the regime forces. Still, he was locked up for months in 2020, accused of being a terrorist, he says. That same year the father of two sold jewellery owned by his wife and mother to fix up his family home, doing most of the work himself. He says it had been completely levelled – as punishment, he believes, for his civil society work.
As he walks around Khaldiyeh, he tells the stories of its streets. “Our martyrs, we buried them in the park here,” he points.
“There is one family, the father died in Sednaya and the mother died in surgery, the children live alone now,” he explains, referring to the notorious Sednaya prison, where Amnesty International says as many as 13,000 people were executed between 2011 and 2015.
Another family, whose apartment has no windows or doors, recently experienced the return of a loved one who “lost his mind” in Sednaya: “He doesn’t remember anything.”
At least 53 of Daher’s family members died in Sednaya. He mentions this almost as an afterthought – underscoring the extreme repression and trauma so many people here have been through.
He points out the homes of single mothers, their husbands killed in the war; damage caused by a mortar; another family of orphaned children living with their grandmother. A lot of children are without proper documentation, their births unregistered due to being displaced or the general chaos and restrictions of war. Officially, these children do not exist.
[ Sally Hayden: Crowds throng Syria's human slaughterhouseOpens in new window ]
[ Sally Hayden: In Homs, efforts to rebuild, but trauma haunts the streetsOpens in new window ]
He says about 70 per cent of apartments in the neighbourhood – some 16,000 in total – remain empty. Of the 14 schools which were open before the war, only three function, all of them primary schools.
Arriving at the dividing line with another neighbourhood, Daher points towards a toppled building he suspects hides a mass grave which was located between two regime checkpoints.
Residents must have a say in what happens next, he emphasises. “We fought, we liberated for people to be able to have a say, to say what they want and what they need.”
He stops at one residential block: four of its eight apartments are inhabited.
Nour al Huda (38) says she returned two weeks ago with her three children.
“There is no electricity, no water, internet, schools for children nearby,” she says. “My son has autism and it’s very important to have centres for people with disabilities that are free.”
During the war, al Huda lost an apartment from bombing, then lost another in the devastating 2023 earthquake.
Her neighbour Fihmye Kouras (61), returned six years ago. She minds three grandchildren, including a girl whose father died in a bombing when she was seven days old.
Kouras is sombre as she says they would like the rubble outside completely removed: “The debris is causing insects and rodents.”
Yet her face breaks into a smile when she recalls the fall of the Assad regime in December. “It was mind-blowing, we didn’t believe it. We were crying, laughing. We didn’t know what was going on. We heard bombing in the sky, shooting, then all of a sudden the mosques started to recite ‘There is victory, we are victorious’. I was at home and started crying.”
Daher bids goodbye to her and walks a wide road back towards the Khalid ibn al-Walid Mosque.
Videos from 2012 showed bodies, in white shrouds, lined up on this same street: 138 people were killed in a single night by regime shelling. Protesters created their own makeshift version of the Homs Clock Tower here and Abdul Baset al-Sarout – known as the “singer of the revolution” – performed, Daher remembers.
Now, women are rooting through bins in the same location, looking for anything they can salvage: food, metal, cans or plastic – a reminder of the dire poverty so many Syrians are being crushed by. Sarout never lived to see the fall of the regime, dying in 2019 from wounds sustained fighting regime forces.
During an Iftar fast-breaking celebration outside the mosque later, there is singing and a performer in a giant panda costume. Glitter is thrown in the air. It offers some kind of joy amid uncertainty and the heaviness of such decimation.
“Why are people coming back to Khaldiyeh?” Daher asks at one point. “Because it’s where our memories are.”
– Hani Alagbar assisted with this reporting
