Syria’s Homs is struggling to rebuild, but old wounds remain open

“Even now I look back and wonder how we survived this nightmare,” Baraa reflects quietly.

The now 20-year-old student joined the jubilant celebrations that took to the streets of Syria last Sunday to mark the end of Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

Her two sisters, Alla and Yana, nod their heads in agreement as we sit huddled together on this cold winter’s day on an old tattered sofa in their modest home in Homs.

Their white-bearded father, Farhan Abdul Ghani, sitting cross-legged on the floor, chimes in: “We didn’t want war. We did not want an eternal president who builds monuments to himself.”

Almost ten years ago, we met for the first time during the worst days of the war that was being waged in the name of their president.

Baraa, a deeply traumatized little girl whose eyes darted wildly back and forth, then struggled to speak.

“Sometimes people killed cats for food,” she blurted out as she sat in a rundown banquet hall, alongside high school officials, Syrian security forces and distraught families.

For several months, many ate little but grass plucked from the ground, leaves from trees, boiled in water with salt and sometimes cinnamon.

“Instead of learning to read and write, I learned about guns,” Baraa told us so bluntly at the time.

Once peaceful protesters who first took to the streets in the spring of 2011 to call for change called Homs the “capital of the revolution” before it escalated into all-out war.

Baraa and her family were among thousands of civilians rescued from the Old City during a rare UN-monitored humanitarian pause in February 2014.

They somehow survived a harrowing two-year siege of the old quarter, where Syrian forces set up their first surrender or starve cordon in this merciless war.

This medieval torture tactic evolved into one of their most brutal weapons, used against one rebel stronghold after another.

A few months later, more civilians were also given a safe exit from the Old City, along with militants who had crossed over to continue their fight in other parts of Syria.

The years leading up to this week have been difficult for this family and many others.

“I felt like I was sleeping and I had lost hope,” Baraa recalls, adjusting the white headscarf she and her sisters wear. “We were always afraid of saying the wrong thing, even at university.”

Now, like many Syrians, she is filled with palpable joy and optimism in these first heady days of a new start.

“I now dream of many things: to graduate from university, to enter a master’s degree, to improve my English.” Her voice trails off as her big goals fill this modest little room.

The frightened girl, whose name means ‘innocence’, has transformed into an impressively confident young woman in fashionable blue jeans and a blue fleece.

Her beloved father, whose name means happy, is beaming with pride. He managed to raise his daughters on his own after their mother was killed by a rocket that fell into their kitchen. It was the children who found her there, fallen over the stove.

Meager earnings from a cart of fruits and vegetables, as well as the kindness of friends, pushed them to a better life.

“Everything is cheaper now, including food and electricity,” he enthuses, nodding to the drop in prices in the markets because roads are now open and soldiers at checkpoints no longer stop goods or ask for bribes.

This is a blessing for a country where, according to the UN, 90% of Syrians live below the poverty line. “Today I could even afford to buy meat,” he says.

Old wounds are still open and painful. Like tens of thousands of other Syrians, he lost a loved one, a brother, in the secret torture cells of Saidnaya prison. When the doors of this notorious prison in Damascus were opened last week, he did not come out.

This excruciating pain and exhilarating happiness is palpable, especially for Syrians who can now bittersweetly return to Homs. Entire sections are still jagged cityscapes of gray rubble and gaping ruins.

“I needed to see it again, but it brings back painful memories,” observes Dr. Hayan al-Abrash, surveying the unsightly landscape of loss around Khalidiya, obliterated by Syrian firepower.

He points to the skeletal remains of a tall building whose facade was shaved by a Scud missile. He brought two more buildings to the ground.

He was also forced to leave the besieged Old City in 2014, leaving his makeshift underground hospital there and in nearby Khalidiya.

He struggles to find it until the shop owner appears to unlock and open the metal shutter. It shows a dilapidated warehouse with a rickety metal staircase leading down to a dark, dank basement.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s it,” he excitedly declares as our flashlights illuminate the cavernous space, including yet another staircase. “Patients used to come here,” he explains.

“Sometimes I’ve carried friends, neighbors, my cousin down those stairs on my back.”

It is next to a wall plastered with arrows pointing to “ambulance” as well as “death road” – the humor is even darker than this room.

The green and black flag of the opposition stands out, now everywhere.

Empty medicine bottles and dirty cardboard bags lie in the far corner of the room, where the wall is charred.

“The regime lit this fire out of revenge,” he says with rising emotion. “They feared doctors, lawyers, political figures even more than fighters.”

“It makes me very angry,” he emphasizes.

I ask if it makes him want to take revenge.

“This is no time for revenge,” he says. “It’s time to build a Syria for everyone, but not for those who killed us and have bloody hands who need to be tried.

“We don’t forgive, it’s impossible for us.”

Everyone we spoke to in Homs said its residents, Muslim and Christian, would rebuild together – and the stories we heard seemed to back that up.

Dr. Hayan also takes us to the site of another underground hospital in the Old City – it was located in the spacious basement of the church, the walls of which are now lined with chairs and tables for family gatherings.

Farhan and his daughters insisted on taking us to see where they had been hiding most of the time during the siege – a refuge in a Jesuit monastery then run by the charismatic Father Frans der Lugt.

A Dutch priest killed in the Old City when he refused to leave its captive and starving inhabitants is now buried in the grounds.

The current pastor, Father Tony Homsi, is surprised when we suddenly appear with Farhan, next to his daughters, emotionally scrolling through his phone to find photos from that time.

A Syrian Jesuit priest leads us down a flight of stairs into a narrow room now used for daily mass, recently transformed into a Christmas grotto with a glittering nativity scene.

“It’s a very beautiful story,” he marvels as our small delegation almost fills the space. “In this grotto, which symbolizes how Jesus and the Holy Family found refuge, there is also the story of this Muslim family.”

Father Tony, who heads the Catholic Church in Homs, was also able to see his family in the northern city of Aleppo for the first time in years.

He also dares to dream big. “It’s time to move forward,” he asserts, quoting Father Frans, who he says inspired him to join the Jesuits.

But he warns that “it will take time to heal our wounds, to heal our memories.”