Mohammed al-Abad, a wiry young man wearing black jeans and wraparound shades, drives his motorcycle several times a week up a gravel hill amassed from the crushed remains of his old neighborhood in a city just outside Damascus, the Syrian capital.
At the top, he surveys a Martian landscape of flattened, dun-colored sand. There is little indication that this was once a thriving community of traditional one-story houses built around courtyards and small garden plots.
In the distance, Mr. Abad, 29, can see the apartment towers of Mezzeh, a relatively affluent, mostly residential district of Damascus, which survived the 14-year civil war largely intact. It might as well be Oz.
“Nothing happened there, and here it is wrecked,” Mr. Abad said on a recent summer afternoon, his tone hardening. “There you can see there was no bombing, no gunfire, nothing. It is all actors, artists, people with money, regime supporters. Nothing bad happened to them, they did not touch them, but they destroyed our lives. It makes me so angry.”
Mr. Abad’s old neighborhood, Khaleej, was in Daraya, a city shattered like so many across Syria. Resurrecting them is one of the major challenges the country’s still tenuous new government faces. It must somehow muster vast resources to help provide shelter and jobs for millions who feel they sacrificed everything to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad and have yet to have their homes or lives restored.
Daraya is a roughly 30-minute drive from central Damascus. But it is a world apart, one of a string of largely Sunni Muslim, working-class communities ringing the capital that formed the backbone of the opposition in the region to Mr. al-Assad.
The regime, determined to make places like Daraya unlivable, subjected them to its brutal wrath. They were barrel-bombed, shelled, sometimes gassed, besieged, starved and depopulated, then stripped of virtually anything portable. “Taafeesh,” you hear repeatedly in Arabic, “ransacked.”
“Initially, we were happy that Damascus was not destroyed; it is such a beautiful city,” said Mohammed Janineh, the mayor of Daraya and a civil engineer. “But when we return to Daraya, we feel devastated. We cannot stop asking ourselves, ‘Why did this happen to Daraya, why all this destruction?’”
Just past the main traffic circle at the entrance to Daraya, a sign over the broad street admonishes visitors to respect the memory of the dead. “Please enter in a calm manner because at every step there was a martyr,” it reads.
In 2011, before the war, the mayor said in an interview, Daraya had a population of 350,000, with many carpenters, electricians and other skilled tradesman earning a decent living in factories. The 160-bed National Hospital attracted doctors, nurses and medical workers, and there was a sizable agricultural community.
Daraya abuts Mezzeh Air Base, a major military installation with a notoriously harsh detention center for political prisoners. Government forces feared that opposition fighters could infiltrate the base from the labyrinthine streets of Khaleej, home to 40,000 people, so it demolished every house to create a buffer zone.
The rest of Daraya fared little better. The worst single-day event, residents said, was a massacre in August 2012, when soldiers stormed the town and mowed down residents. At least 700 people were killed, according to Yasser Jamaleddine, a spokesman for the local defense forces.
After that, about three-quarters of the population fled. Regime soldiers barred residents from returning and demanded fat bribes to let anything past their checkpoints, so prices skyrocketed for staples like coffee, sugar, flour and oil.
Daraya was virtually empty from 2016 to 2019, when soldiers started letting residents trickle back. The population, 25,000 last December when the regime fell, the mayor said, is now more than 150,000. About half of the nearly 5,400 people arrested remain missing, while 451 died in custody, activists said.
The destruction is breathtaking. Partly collapsed residential buildings line one street after another. Chunks of concrete still attached to construction rods dangle over empty streets like demonic mobile sculptures. A World Bank report in 2022 estimated that 43 percent of Daraya’s housing stock was destroyed.
In terms of damaged infrastructure and services, the report ranked Daraya as the worst among the 14 cities surveyed. About one-third of its road network needs major repairs. Incessant bombing decimated power, water and sewage systems. Rubble clogs the sewage pipes, so waste seeps into the ground. Seven out of eight health care facilities are virtually not functional. The National Hospital is an empty shell.
After fleeing abroad in 2013, Mr. Janineh returned in 2020. “When I first came back, I used to avoid Daraya. I didn’t want to see the destruction; it was shocking,” the mayor said. “When you see your house, everything you have worked for completely destroyed, you feel so depressed.”
Daraya is a typical example of why so few among millions of refugees have returned. They have no homes and no jobs to come back to, and usually lack the resources to rebuild.
In Jobar, a district of Damascus that is devastated like Daraya, residents were only recently allowed back.
After a recent Friday Prayer sermon, worshipers rallied to demand reconstruction. Arguments erupted over whether to push the government or to allow it more time.
The mosque was a postcard of wreckage. Omar Rabia, the imam, standing in front of a bare concrete wall, urged the government to protect those returning and to build them homes.
“Since the liberation,” he said, “we have been waiting for practical solutions that will show our sons that something is changing.” He cautioned worshipers not to resent those with funds to rebuild. “This country will not be built atop all these grudges,” he said.
Syria’s finance minister, Mohammed Yisr Barnieh, a prominent economist, has said that there is no public money any time soon for reconstruction, and that the government is looking to the private sector. “We need to be innovative,” he said in a brief interview.
But residents worry that unless the government restores basic infrastructure, private investors will be reluctant to build.
Some impoverished returnees camp out in their old apartment buildings.
“We have no place to go, this is our home,” said Hind Sadiq, 55, the mother in a seven-member family living on the cement floor of one repaired room. Bullet holes pockmark the building’s walls, and most rooms are an obstacle course of smashed rubble and broken windows. Cracked pipes and rebar jut out at odd angles.
A half-dozen families have returned to what was once 24 apartments in a six-story family building. Nobody goes out at night, when there are no people, cars or lighting on the pitch-dark streets, only roaming packs of wild dogs. “It is still better than living under the old regime,” Mrs. Sadiq said.
Khadija al-Qarah, her sister-in-law, agreed. She said she was 51, then added, “Considering what I have seen, you should put 500.” Asked how living amid utter devastation affected her mood, she said: “We have gotten used to it. The destruction mirrors our lives.”
Mr. Abad now rents in Daraya, but when his agitation over his destroyed house gets overwhelming, he jumps on his motorcycle to feel at least physically close to his former life. “We come here to lift the pressure on our hearts,” he said.
Without help, the neighborhood cannot revive, he said. “It might take 20 years. It is not just Daraya, of course — it is like this in all of Syria.”
Leen Rihawi contributed reporting.
