Members of the family ducked under an empty doorway and stepped over the rubble from their home.
“It’s shocking, really shocking,” said Abdulrahman Alama, 37, as he stared at the damaged building. A refugee in Lebanon for 13 years since the start of Syria’s civil war, he had returned to Homs and was visiting the family home with his sister and another relative just a week after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad. Any joy was tempered by the sight.
“I don’t want to send a photo to my father because it is too shocking,” he said.
Days after the lightning-fast rebel offensive that ousted Mr. al-Assad, Syrians are going back home by the thousands, among them refugees, the internally displaced and detainees emerging from prisons. And residents are shaking off the terror of living under dictatorship.
In Homs, people were reacting with both smiles and tears, thanking God and frequently cursing their former president.
Much of Syria was devastated by Mr. al-Assad’s brutal fight to suppress a popular uprising and hold on to power. Homs, an ancient city in central Syria where protesters were the first to take up weapons in 2011 against his oppression, became a center of resistance.
Warplanes bombed the city. Neighborhoods were sealed off and the population starved and battered into surrender. Hundreds of people were killed as the Assad regime besieged parts of the city for three years. Even after the attacks stopped, intense repression remained in place.
Years after the bombardment, there are still scenes of indescribable dereliction. Whole districts are bomb sites, where ravaged buildings stretch for block after block. Walls are scarred with shrapnel, collapsed roofs tilt at dangerous angles, and mounds of rubble fill the sidewalks.
“Complete destruction,” said Mr. Alama, gesturing at his ruined neighborhood, Baba Amr, “and then God destroyed Assad.”
Tragedy touched nearly every family in Homs during the brutal Assad campaign.
The people of Homs turned out for peaceful protests in the spring of 2011, joining the call for justice that was rippling through the Arab world. They were cautious at first, aware of how the former president, Hafez al-Assad — Bashar al-Assad’s father — had crushed a 1982 rebellion in the nearby city of Hama, killing thousands of civilians in one of the bloodiest episodes in recent Middle Eastern history.
But as the Assad regime used lethal force, clashes increasingly broke out, and within months a full-blown armed rebellion was underway. Baba Amr became an opposition-held area until February 2012, when Mr. al-Assad sent in security forces to crack down.
Rabia Asad, a truck driver, had moved out of Baba Amr, but was helping families flee from the city, he said. People scrambled through the sewer system to escape the onslaught but hundreds were killed and their houses burned at the end of the monthlong assault on the neighborhood, he said.
“Assad had us up to the neck,” he said.
Rebel fighters occupied the houses and the Assad army shelled the neighborhood with heavy artillery, said Mahmoud al-Shater, 23, whose house, next door to Mr. Alama’s, was smashed. Mr. al-Shater was just 10 at the time his family took refuge outside the city.
Mr. al-Shater’s father, Abdul Moler al-Shater, a construction worker, disappeared after the police stopped him and a driver at a checkpoint in the city in 2013.
“If someone falls in the hands of the government, they die or starve to death,” his mother, Hannah, 51, said. She never learned what happened to her husband and asked that only her first name be published for fear of repercussions. “Maybe Assad will come back,” she said.
A year after her husband disappeared, a stray bullet killed her 8-year-old son, Mr. al-Shater’s younger brother, striking him in the head as he stood in the courtyard of their house. Police officers came to investigate, but Hannah said she refused to talk to them because she was grieving and she never learned the results of their investigation.
She lived off donations, raising her two remaining sons on her own, moving house several times as the fighting shifted.
Over three long years, the government besieged one district after another, sealing off neighborhoods and starving the population and fighters into surrender. The ferocity of the fighting increased, with warplanes attacking even the old city, with its black basalt walls and covered markets, and the ancient Christian quarter.
Survivors and fighters were eventually evacuated in buses arranged by the United Nations to rebel-held areas in northern Syria.
An entire generation of young men fled the country to avoid arrest or enlistment into the Syrian Army.
Diaa al-Shaami, 23, was barely a teenager when his two elder brothers went abroad. Eventually, things quieted, and he began studies in trade and accounting and started a coffee shop to make ends meet.
Interviewed between serving customers, he flashed a smile of happiness. There had been a constant fear of arbitrary arrest, for saying the wrong thing or just while walking in the street, he said. Plainclothes security police, known as Shabiha, would demand a free daily coffee from him and helped themselves to packs of cigarettes in his shop, he said, abusing him if he dared to ask for payment.
Tamam Kara Hussain, 69, who lives alone in one room of his damaged home, the upper floor gaping open to the skies, was tending herbs and onions in boxes on his doorstep. He lost three brothers who were detained at a checkpoint and never seen again. His two sons were away fighting with the rebels, and the rest of the family had fled abroad, he said.
“We just wanted freedom, and he did all this,” he said, cursing Mr. al-Assad. “But they will come back,” he said of the people who had fled. “It’s our land.”
Homs was already busy again. Refugees were arriving on buses from Lebanon every day, cramming into cars and minibuses to travel the last leg to their homes.
Jihad al-Surur, 50, a local businessman, was directing a bulldozer to clear concrete blocks and rubble that the Assad army had placed in piles as rudimentary defenses as the rebels approached Homs this month.
Mr. al-Surur said he was donating his machines and workers to help open up the roads and collect garbage: “It’s a mission.”
Mr. al-Assad’s government had done little to repair the damaged city in 14 years, he said. “He did not do anything for his people,” he said.
Syrians all over the city stopped a reporter to send a message to the outside world.
“We need everything, water, electricity, wood, connection,” said Mufid al-Swabe, 40, a teacher of English literature, stopping his motorbike to ask that his message be passed on.
Amid the suffering, there were brave smiles.
“It’s bitter and sweet,” said Maria al-Amin, 45. She said she had found her brother’s name among thousands listed as dead at the notorious Sednaya prison in central Syria.
She said she was happy with Mr. al-Assad’s ouster for her children’s future. Desperately poor, she lives in a half-ruined house with three children and a husband who sells scrap metal that he finds among the ruins. Ms. al-Amin was laying out stale rounds of flat bread on her porch to sell.
“The sadness is inside but not on the outside,” she said.
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