Syrians want to go home, but many no longer have one to return to

DAMASCUS, Syria — Lubna Labaad walked among a flattened wasteland that was once her neighbors’ homes.

The only building left standing was a mosque, a years-old message scrawled on its outer wall from when rebels surrendered control of the area to the Syrian regime during the country’s brutal civil war: “Forgive us, oh martyrs.”

Now, many former residents of the Qaboun neighborhood in the capital, Damascus — like Labaad; her husband, Da’aas; and their 8-year-old son — are trying to come back. After the 13-year war ended suddenly with the ouster of President Bashar Assad in December, the frozen front lines dividing the country melted away overnight.

“We were waiting for that very moment to return,” said Lubna Labaad, 26.

Their home is still standing but was stripped of pipes, sinks and even electrical outlets by a soldier who neighbors said had squatted there for years with his family. Still, the Labaads are luckier than many others who have returned to find nothing but rubble.

Syria’s conflict forced more than 13 million people to flee, in what the United Nations called one of the largest displacement crises in the world. More than 6 million Syrians left the country, and some 7 million have been displaced inside Syria, including Labaad and her family.

In an interview in January, Syria’s interim president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, said he was confident that within two years millions of Syrians would come back from abroad. But the war went on for so long that people had established new lives away from their hometowns.

It is not clear exactly how many people have returned so far. Many have come back to see what happened with homes and hometowns, but the decision to return permanently is not an easy one, especially if there is nothing to come back to. Many others have opted to stay put for the time being, including in camps in Turkey and Jordan that have yet to empty out, as they watch what happens in Syria.

An estimated 328,000 homes in Syria have either been destroyed or severely damaged, according to a 2022 U.N. report, and between 600,000 and 1 million homes are either moderately or lightly damaged. The analysis was done before a devastating earthquake hit parts of northwestern Syria in 2023 that caused the collapse of still more buildings and damage to others.

The government’s housing ministry did not respond to questions about whether or how it planned to help in the country’s reconstruction. The government is grappling with a host of challenges after Assad’s downfall, from a security vacuum to an economy in chaos to Israel’s incursion into parts of southern Syria.

And recent unrest that has left hundreds dead in the country’s coastal region — many of them civilians killed by forces aligned with the government, according to a war monitor — is raising the specter of spiraling sectarian violence.

Even for those who have returned home, the joy has been dulled by the damage already done. People are having to search to find their long tucked-away house keys “and are coming back and not finding their homes,” said Da’aas Labaad, 33.

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