Reclaiming Life Under Assad’s Rubble
The road north out of Suqaylabiyah is an endless landscape of broken homes.
The Christian town had served for 10 years as the anchor of Assad’s frontline in the al-Ghab plain, a low-lying area in Hama governorate fed by the banks of the Orontes river. Suqaylabiyah itself sits atop a small hill at the foot of the Shashabo Mountains, and small Sunni villages dot the landscape north of the town, working their way to what had for years been the anchor of opposition lines: the town of Qalaat al-Mudiq.
In late 2019 the regime finally broke this frontline, claiming physical control over the villages it had long ago pounded to dust with artillery and aerial bombardment. The remaining residents, those who hadn’t already fled after years of near-constant regime shelling and bombing, now escaped to the Turkish border, joining nearly 4 million other displaced Syrians from across the country.
Following the country’s liberation by the then-opposition in late November and early December 2024 during ‘Operation Deterring Aggression’, displaced residents – often whole families – rushed back to their homes. In some areas, like the city of Latakia, men and women who fled regime gunfire 12 years earlier came back within hours of Assad’s fall. By December 8th, the number of returnees had far outpaced years of attempted ‘returns’ by the Assad regime, which residents had long known to be a euphemism for kidnapping and internment into the regime’s dark detention systems.
As these residents returned home amid the opposition’s liberation, they realized the full extent of the regime’s terror and the mercy of its oversights. As part of its ‘scorched earth’ policy, the Assad regime had fully intended to depopulate and raze opposition-held towns prior to their recapture, and succeeded in many cases. Yet, though often looted and vandalized, many of these residents’ homes in towns across the Ghab plain remained intact and standing. Those lucky ones reunited with their childhood friends, and partied with their neighbors and extended families amid city-wide celebrations.
Some areas, though, saw more intensive bombardment than others. Ghab plain residents from northern Hama, and their neighbors in southern Idlib, did not share the same experience of joy and celebration as others with homes to return to. Most of these residents returned only to rubble, strewn in piles across a vast expanse of barren farmland covered in mines and unexploded ordnance.
IDPs in the surrounding areas, those with cars and the ability to easily pack up and move, were quick to return. According to locals, though, it was not until April that most displaced families began returning to the al-Ghab region.
Even then, only around 3,000 families have come back, most on a temporary basis. Ibrahim used to work in the city’s Local Council before the regime takeover: “The number of families moving back increases every day now, but many cannot return because their homes are completely destroyed,” he explains from his own destroyed house he is in the midst of rebuilding.
Earlier that day at the municipality office in Suqaylabiyah, a new government official overseeing the region explained the challenges his constituents are facing. “Areas that have retained some shape have seen some returnees, but most are only here during the school break, rebuilding whatever they can before they return to Idlib when school begins again,” he said. Nothing escaped the bombing and looting of regime forces, so even if locals are able to rebuild their homes here, there are no schools for their children to attend.
Mehdi, a long-time resident of Qalaat al-Mudiq, returned to his home early in March, nearly 11 years after fleeing from the regime. As the war wore on, he and his family lived under increasingly constant shelling and airstrikes, many of which would come in the middle of the night.
Mehdi stands in front of his gutted house, his previously landscaped front yard now a ruin of dirt and rubble. // Photo credit: Gregory Waters
“The shelling would usually begin around 2am,” recalls Mehdi while standing in the middle of his home, which had been looted down to its concrete blocks. When this happened, he said, “I would pack everyone into the car and drive to the mountain until morning.” One day he and his extended family had been walking down Qalaat al-Mudiq’s main street when they were hit by a regime bomb. Mehdi survived, but he lost many family members that day. Still, he stayed in his house. It was not until he received a tip that the regime’s Political Security Directorate was looking for him that he finally fled to Turkey.
In 2015, the opposition was able to fully capture the mountains north and east of the town and liberate most of the northern Hama and Idlib countryside. The resulting Russian intervention and concentration of the new frontlines here in between Qalaat al-Mudiq and Suqaylabiyah wrought a new level of destruction upon the town. When the regime finally captured the area, they turned Mehdi’s house into a command post. Gaping holes in his westward facing walls – struck by tank fire from regime positions across the valley – were sloppily filled in with cement and bricks.
A westward-facing wall in Mehdi’s house, hastily patched by occupying regime soldiers after a tank shell fired from across the valley damaged it. // Photo credit: Gregory Waters
Eventually, the unit occupying his house withdrew. They left nothing behind. Ragged holes indicate where every outlet and light fixture was ripped out so soldiers could access the internal wiring. The stairs and floors were left bereft of tile, as were most of the walls. The kitchen was scraped bare, the soldiers even taking the time to smash the stone shelves. Both stories’ bathrooms were likewise worn down to the brick, with the ceramic bathtubs, sinks, toilets, and soap holders cleanly scraped away. Even Mehdi’s carefully planted trees and bushes outside did not survive the scouring of Assad’s army.
Mehdi left Syria in 2014, taking with him his wife and four children. He, like millions of other Syrians fleeing the Assad regime’s violence, found themselves living as refugees in southern Turkey when the 2023 earthquake ripped the region apart and claimed the lives of his youngest two children. Now he sleeps on the floor of his friend’s apartment in Hama, traveling to his ruined house each day as he tries to rebuild his life brick by brick.
All that remains of Mehdi’s bathtub after years of regime occupation and looting in his home. // Photo credit: Gregory Waters
Like everyone else across this region, Mehdi is relying on his own money and labor to rebuild his home, as there is no assistance from the new government. Every government institution was left gutted and incompetent by the time the regime fell, with no resources or expertise left in place to address all of the locals’ needs.
“We must rehabilitate the government first, then we can rebuild,” explains the regional official in Suqaylabiyah, who wished to remain anonymous as per government policy. The government and local organizations alike are severely lacking in money, machines, and technical experts, the basic resources needed for the clearance and rebuilding of these towns.
In the absence of resilient governing structures, officials from the new government have supported and facilitated the work of charities and private donors. In the nearby Kafr Nabudah region, a large group of displaced locals returned on April 18, facilitated in part by a fundraising effort from the Christian community in Suqaylabiyah and from some Syrian-Americans from the town. The Ismaili Aga Khan Foundation, which has its Syrian headquarters in Hama’s Salamiyah, also paid for a group of doctors and psychologists from Salamiyah to meet the arriving families and provide them with a free health clinic. This convoy was escorted to Kafr Nabudah by police officers from the central government’s General Security Service.
Where the government has taken a lead role is in demining. Units of the country’s new military began major demining efforts across northern Hama in April. The White Helmets, now integrated directly into the country’s Civil Defense Directorate, assist in mine detection and mapping, according to both Ibrahim and the regional official. Armored units recently supplied with Turkish demining equipment, and engineers with new handheld detectors, perform the actual task of demining. However, locals clearing rubble from their houses also regularly stumble across unexploded ordinance. Mehdi himself found a rocket buried beneath the collapsed roof of his shed while removing the rubble surrounding it. The lack of minefield maps from both the regime and opposition forces over the past ten years is also leaving a deadly toll of military engineers and locals killed during these efforts.
Remote-controlled demining vehicles recently supplied by Turkey as well as a captured regime tank prepare to clear farm land outside the destroyed village of Hammamiyat, al-Ghab. // Photo credit: Syrian Ministry of Defense
Once the fields are demined, they then need to be rehabilitated as functional agricultural land. South of Suqaylabiyah, in the Masyaf countryside – which had always been under regime control and thus suffered much less damage – families can be seen laying new irrigation lines. These lines are often connected to individual wells, powered either by generators or, increasingly, by solar panel banks tied to each farm. The areas to the north, like Qalaat al-Mudiq, are in a much worse state as the regime forces also stripped the land of all irrigation infrastructure. Those without access to power or pipes struggle receiving consistent water supply. Many families, both those who remained and those who have returned, have begun digging new wells as those existing wells in Suqaylabiyah and its countryside could barely meet the families’ previous needs. The new government is trying to regulate this practice in order to protect the water table from pollution and over-extraction, but again, largely destroyed local institutions are hindering this process. The government’s regional director has mostly been forced to authorize local wells after they’ve already been built in an attempt to at least keep updated records.
Two boys cool off in one of the canals which bring water to the farmlands around Qalaat al-Mudiq. // Photo credit: Gregory Waters
All of these dynamics can be seen in just a short drive around the Qalaat al-Mudiq region – An area that once housed over 100,000 people now reduced entirely to rubble, with its land destroyed, and its government buildings and schools requiring complete reconstruction. Yet this is just one fraction of the land area devastated by the Assad regime, which extends far beyond the well-documented destruction of neighborhoods in Damascus, Homs, Raqqa, and Aleppo. This huge stretch of land running from the al-Ghab plains east and north to the Aleppo countryside sat as one of the country’s main frontlines for ten continuous years.
“There are no services, no foundations left to build on,” describes the region’s director. “Entire villages have disappeared.” He explains that the pressure from even the small number of returning families has added a huge strain on the already overworked services of the region.
A UNHCR survey in January found that 95% of the 350,000 displaced residents from the Ma’ra and Suqaylabiyah Districts reported their homes were severely or completely destroyed. But assisting in the return on these people takes much more than ‘just’ rebuilding homes. As the survey notes, the dignified and sustainable return of these families requires “jobs, housing, schools, hospitals, and basic services like electricity and clean water.” International organizations like UNHCR are assisting in some of these aspects, but themselves face major funding shortfalls. In the end, rebuilding these communities and enabling the permanent housing of Syria’s millions of displaced people will require a united effort of charities, international organizations, and a Syrian government untethered by outdated western sanctions.
