In Syria, the destruction from 13 years of war has become part of the landscape. There is barely a town or city undamaged, or a community untouched, in the sprawling country of 23 million.
In the main cities like Damascus, the capital, entire neighborhoods and suburbs were pulverized as the dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russia and Iran, his allies, sought to crush an armed rebellion that emerged from the 2011 Arab Spring uprising.
The fighting and repression forced more than half of the population to flee their homes. They left behind ghost towns, whole sections of cities where block after block remains shrouded in darkness and uninhabitable.
Rebels eventually toppled the regime in December 2024. Focused on consolidating power, the new government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa has barely begun the task of clearing and rebuilding.
Over three million Syrians have already returned since Mr. al-Assad fled and took refuge in Russia. Many are living in the ruins, or in a tent beside them. Some have patched up an apartment perched halfway up the empty skeleton of a residential block.
The ancient city of Aleppo and its surrounding province experienced some of the most extensive damage through the years of war — and has been the site of recent clashes.
The front line ran through the fabled old city, renowned for its courtyard houses and covered souk.
“They were fighting over it,” said Razan Abdulwahab, an architect coordinating projects in the area for the U.N.-Habitat, the United Nations urban development program. “It is a big disaster.”
Sixty percent of the old city was destroyed, including many buildings registered as antiquities, she said. Even as work is underway to restore parts of the souk, the old city remains a horrifying landscape of dust and rubble.
“I cannot forget that day, looking at all the damage,” said Abdul Qadir, a trader who returned in 2017 to find his business and home near the old city destroyed. “Why? For what?”
Many Syrians are struggling to survive. A third of all housing in the country is damaged or destroyed. Unemployment is high, and 90 percent of Syrians are living in poverty, according to the United Nations.
A U.N.-Habitat survey found that 31 percent of housing stock needs to be rebuilt or restored, leaving the country shy 1.9 million homes for roughly 10 million people.
The strain is visible. In the southwestern city of Dara’a, a cradle of the Syrian uprising in 2011, neighborhoods that supported the rebellion lie decimated.
In some places, the rubble is so deep that people cannot find where their houses once stood, said Muhammad Kheir Bajbuj, 50. Sometimes, they cannot even find the street.
Only two houses are occupied on his street, his own and that of a cousin, who returned with her family after a charity helped repair her roof. “Very few people came back because most of us have no money,” Mr. Bajbuj said.
Beyond the main cities, villages and towns are littered with land mines and unexploded bombs. The explosives are killing and maiming those who return.
One afternoon last summer in Deir al-Zour, in eastern Syria, a woman and her teenage son set off an explosion as they were scavenging in a trash dump. The mother was killed and the boy was badly injured in the face and eyes.
Deir al-Zour has been described as the most heavily damaged city in Syria by U.N.-Habitat. Traffic weaves past craters and around mounds of rubble. Children play in the ruins beneath great slabs of concrete hanging perilously from buildings. Dust clogs the air.
Like much of eastern Syria, Deir al-Zour suffered the additional trial of being subjugated by the Islamic State, or ISIS. Its roads and bridges are broken. Its churches and mosques are reduced to rubble. Schools and hospitals are few.
The task to rebuild is immense. Housing alone will cost $80 billion, U.N.-Habitat estimates. The World Bank has put Syria’s reconstruction costs at an estimated $216 billion.
“There is still no talk of putting together a comprehensive economic reconstruction plan,” the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported recently.
With the Trump administration and many other Western donors cutting international assistance budgets, Syria’s government is seeking money from the private sector.
That bears its own risks, experts warned. If not handled fairly, private-sector-led reconstruction can lead to renewed cronyism and social inequality that could create more instability.
“If we really want stability, reconstruction support has to be provided,” said Hiroshi Takabayashi, the head of the country program in Syria for U.N.-Habitat. Syria was a cornerstone for stability for much of the Middle East, he added.
“If we fail here,” he said, “this whole world order may not be sustained.”
After so much loss and destruction, Syrians do not ask for much.
“Who will give me compensation? Who will pay us back for the people we lost, the money we lost?” said Kadri Musalli, a storekeeper in Deir al-Zour, who said his brother bled out on the street under shellfire during the fighting.
“We can climb back up and achieve civilized growth,” he said, “but it will be very, very slow.”
Carlotta Gall is a senior correspondent, covering the war in Ukraine.
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