On a shopping street close to the famous Homs Clock Tower, a small, elderly man is peering at socks hanging in a window, decorated with misshapen faces of ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad and his relatives.
A civil engineer, the man says he was jailed under the Assad regime several times, lost work and saw “many people die”. But these socks, he feels, are unnecessary. “It’s not right to create something like this ... it’s not polite,” he says. “I am from Homs, I supported the revolution ... We won. He ran away. Enough.”
A woman steps forward. “We want a trial. We want all the mothers to see what will happen to him,” she says of Assad, who fled to Russia in December. “We want it to happen before we die because all the Syrian mothers suffered.”
Striding by, in the centre of the street, are two men wearing black balaclavas, AK-47s slung across their bodies. One has the first part of the Islamic declaration of faith, “there is no God but God”, written on his balaclava in shiny white writing. Across the street, a stall displays baseball caps, sashes and statues with the Syrian revolutionary flag.
It also has khaki clothing, tactical vests lined with gun holders and patches, including a black and white one of the design that became associated with the Islamic State terror group. The stall offers a reminder of the jihadist roots of the leaders of the rebel coalition that brought an end to the Assad regime – as one Syrian put it, “jihadism has gone mainstream”.
Syria’s new government is walking a tightrope, trying to state-build in a devastated country with a diverse and deeply divided society. New president Ahmed al-Sharaa – who broke ties with al Qaeda years ago, and actively fought Islamic State – has vowed to respect minorities and women’s rights, though many Syrians, and the international community, worry he may intend to impose strict Islamic rule, while hardline Islamists, who backed Sharaa in the past, complain he is becoming too progressive.
Hundreds of thousands of people were killed over almost 14 years of Syria’s devastating war, millions forced out of the country and about 100,000 disappeared into regime prisons.
Homs, Syria’s third largest city, was dubbed the “capital of the revolution”. During the early years of fighting, it became a patchwork: areas divided, some under siege and some relatively unscathed; checkpoints and snipers making movement difficult or even impossible; control shifting between the Syrian military and various armed groups. Even today, it is easy to see which parts were bombarded by the regime – that is where the overwhelming destruction is.
In central Homs there are billboards commemorating the regime’s fall. “We broke the constraints and we smashed down all our chains forever,” one reads, a picture of wrists in handcuffs beside it.
In the past few months, huge numbers of displaced Syrians have made their way home, while others have been forced out. In particular, sectarian violence in Syria’s coastal region last month raised mass concern that conflict could spread again.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) monitoring group documented the killing of 1,084 people between March 6th and March 17th, saying militants aligned with the new government killed at least 639 people, including civilians and disarmed former regime forces, while groups linked to the former regime killed at least 445, including 231 civilians. On April 3rd, Amnesty International called for an investigation into the killing of civilians from the Alawite sect specifically – to which the Assad family belongs.
The government has set up a fact-finding committee to investigate what happened.
Activist and freelance journalist Tarek Baderkhan (33) became involved in the revolution in 2011, living under siege in Homs from 2012 to 2014. He was exiled north, under a withdrawal deal, and returned to the city on December 7th last.
“Believe me it’s a mixed feeling, until this moment I can’t believe it,” he says. Walking around his neighbourhood, Khalidiya, “sometimes I cry, [remembering] a very good friend died here who I grew up with, or one was arrested here, a neighbour was sniped here or bombed”, he adds. Khaldiyeh had a population of about 80,000 before the war, with almost all fleeing or being forced out in its early years.
After the siege ended, the regime put checkpoints around opposition neighbourhoods such as Khalidiya, blocking returns and, even years later, “they didn’t provide services because they said it was a terrorist neighbourhood” says Baderkhan.
Family members and neighbours are returning to find out what is left of their buildings. Many were totally destroyed, others looted and then further damaged by pro-regime militants. Baderkhan brought his two daughters – aged five and seven – back with him. “They don’t know Homs ... I wanted to show them my house,” he says. His apartment was daubed with graffiti: “Assad or we burn the country” − a slogan of regime supporters.
Baderkhan says that while the new government is offering amnesty for those who did not kill or torture, Homs faces a “social problem” where “people are not able to forget”. Those who return are angry with those who stayed, he says. “They kept silent ... this is really a problem for us, we are not able to forgive.”
Ongoing kidnappings and murders have been reported in Homs. On March 30th, the SNHR documented the killings of four children and a woman in the city’s Karm al-Zaytoun neighbourhood, after two unidentified gunmen raided their home.
In the period directly after the regime’s fall, Baderkhan says “there was no safety, security, no intelligence, so the number of incidents of revenge were much bigger than now”. Today, most people don’t support revenge attacks, he says. Instead, “we want the state to hold them accountable.”
In the meantime, Homs desperately requires “reconstruction, rebuilding”.
* * *
In the Bustan al-Diwan neighbourhood, Christian shopkeeper Atif Akel (55) is smoking behind his cash register.
“The first 20 days was chaos, they opened the jails and the prisons and the criminals went out,” Akel recalls. As rebels advanced across Syria, political prisoners and people locked up for other crimes were freed. There were “clashes in some neighbourhoods, not between groups, between individuals”, Akel says.
“But slowly, slowly HTS [Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham – group that led the rebel coalition] started to take over and it’s getting better.” HTS has technically been dissolved into the new government security forces, to whom Akel feels he can report wrongdoing. “They have an office, a police department.”
Akel says he is still worried because of social media. “A small thing, a theft or a murder they make it much bigger and they make us afraid. I think there are people exaggerating and inciting, getting benefits.”
His phone data stopped working the previous day and, when it came back, he had a rush of panicked messages expressing concern that something had happened to him. “A problem is also people who live abroad, all of us in the city here have people abroad, they believe the rumours on social media... Relatives abroad call me, I’m sitting here in my shop and they’re making me anxious, saying ‘This is what’s going on in your city?‘”
The shelves behind where Akel sits used to be filled with bottles of alcohol, but he removed them following the regime’s fall, replacing them with energy drinks. Akel has heard rumours of people who sold alcohol having their shops “destroyed”.
When he visited local authorities to ask if he could get an authorisation to sell alcohol: they told him: “There are no new regulations, everything is suspended.” He now waits for an official government communication.
