Snapshots from a Damascus suburb

What Syria's Darayya tells us about destruction, reconstruction, and return

Less than a half-hour’s drive from the bustle and charm of central Damascus, the suburb of Darayya feels a world away. Starved, barrel bombed, emptied of residents and looted for scrap, Darayya tells the story of how Syria’s regime deliberately rendered large swathes of its own country uninhabitable. It also conveys just how much time and support are needed if ruined areas are to become livable once again. That’s a lesson as obvious as it is ignored by those pushing for refugees to return to a country unprepared to absorb them.

Driving into Darayya, two versions of the town come into focus. Straight ahead, the central roundabout is flanked by buildings that survived siege and bombardment from 2012 to 2016. One has a half-finished array of solar panels sprouting from its roof: a common sight in a country where public electricity has collapsed, leading households and communities to pool resources and install local alternatives.

On the righthand side of the road, however, is an area so thoroughly flattened that I had to double-check with my colleague, Malak, to confirm that it was once inhabited. Buildings in this neighborhood, known as al-Khaleej, were not just bombed: They were systematically blown up by regime forces, who transformed the area into a buffer zone between the Mezzeh Military Airport and rebel forces in Darayya.

Today, al-Khaleej is a moonscape of dirt, cinderblock, and other debris not valuable enough for pro-regime forces to have bothered looting them. Reportedly, the area also became a dumping ground for debris carted in from elsewhere in Darayya. Malak and I visited with a friend of a friend, Abu H, who brought us to the spot where our mutual friend’s house once stood—recognizable thanks to a pole sticking up from the rubble.

Farther from the frontline, the damage is less uniform but equally breathtaking. The tip of a minaret announces what was once a mosque, now a deconstructed tangle of concrete and rebar.

Others buildings are still standing but damaged beyond repair or habitability, with upper floors collapsed and hunks of concrete dangling like wind chimes. Some are damaged but partly occupied, by residents who began to trickle back starting in 2018. Returnees were largely the most vulnerable: those who couldn’t afford to keep renting apartments elsewhere, and thus returned to neighborhoods with severe damage and wrecked services.

It's hard to say how much of Darayya is uninhabitable. In 2022, the World Bank estimated that up to 43 percent of its housing stock had been damaged or destroyed: a daunting figure that nonetheless feels conservative when the damage is viewed up close. In an area with a pre-war population estimated around 250,000, that hints at tens of thousands of people with no home to return to. That’s not to mention those who lost their lives and their loved ones: Activists we bumped into shared the estimate that around 9,000 from Darayya had been killed, including more than 500 who died in regime prisons. And Darayya, unlike some other communities, saw almost none of its sons or daughters emerge alive from Syria’s gulag.

Of course, habitability is about more than housing. The same World Bank report found that 7 of Darayya’s 8 healthcare facilities had been knocked out of operation. That includes this hospital, which is no longer recognizable as such.

Perhaps what I found most disorienting about Darayya is how all this wreckage coexists with a partial return to life. Kids playing football on a playground littered with debris; old men smoking shisha on a first floor apartment with no outer walls; elementary school girls pouring out of class into a bustling street, which happens to be a few minutes’ walk from scenes of utter devastation.

In Darayya, as in so much of Syria, that juxtaposition is the stuff of daily life. Families and neighborhoods have fought to restore minimal forms of livability, from installing solar panels to fixing up damaged schoolhouses and replacing looted electrical wires.

Until now, that is what “reconstruction” has meant in Syria: a dogged, bottom-up process of rehabilitating ruined areas bit by bit, drawing on resources from within the community and diaspora support networks. Most have received no governmental support, whether from Damascus or from foreign donors. On the contrary, Syria’s fallen regime made rebuilding harder: Security forces manned checkpoints at the entrances to ruined areas, which levied fees on construction materials (or blocked return entirely). Meanwhile, Western sanctions still complicate the process of transferring money through diaspora networks.

Such grassroots efforts warrant admiration and even awe. But they should not be romanticized, and their potential must not be overstated. Without serious support, the people of Darayya will struggle even to clear the rubble and demolish buildings that are too far gone to save—let alone rebuild them. The same is true elsewhere in the Damascus suburbs; in parts of Homs, the first city to rise up en masse against the regime; in Aleppo, where the violence of war was compounded by that of the 2023 earthquake; in swathes of northeast Syria cratered by American bombs dropped in pursuit of ISIS; and for that matter in Gaza, Beirut’s southern suburbs, Mosul, and beyond.

Indeed, it is chilling to observe just how much of the world has come to regard such nihilistic destruction as ordinary—so long as it occurs within the Arab and Muslim worlds. Hence my colleague Peter Harling’s observation that the Middle East has become the world’s bloodlands: “a place where different rules apply, where human life is more expendable.”

This destruction, and the suffering that lurks behind it, defies comprehension. Even up close, it takes on an ethereal quality. The enormity of what has happened comes through only in flashes: The skeleton of a mosque where a community once prayed, the mound of dirt that was a family’s home, the story of a child whom Abu H found playing with a grenade. “I told him he needed to give it to me or it could explode. He said, ‘It’s okay if it explodes, I have another!’”

There is every reason for wealthy countries to help communities like Darayya start to rebuild—whether seen through the lens of basic humanity or cynical calculations about refugee return. For now, we mostly see the opposite. Western countries dither and delay on aid and sanctions relief, while escalating rhetoric about how now is the time for refugees to go home. Too many Syrians thus find that their hometowns remain uninhabitable, while their places of refuge feel increasingingly uninhabitable too. It’s a cruelty almost as absurd and grotesque as the destruction itself—but one which should be far easier to begin setting right.