In the shadow of a building with its top three floors sheared off, leaving concrete slabs hanging in mid-air, stood a kebab stall. Under a tarpaulin weighed down at the edges with cinder blocks, a thin man with a thick white beard smiled as he stoked the fire in a narrow grill. He moved back and forth to a table set on a wheelbarrow, tenderly inspecting a dish of tomatoes, greens, and a few skewers of meat. A torn mat covered the ground, while a plastic ice box and a few more cinder blocks served as seating for customers who had yet to arrive.
The streets were mostly deserted here in Amiriya, a run-down suburb of Aleppo that once marked the frontline between rebel-held and government-controlled areas. But there were glimpses of life: children hopping on and off a rusty motorcycle, a woman selling cigarettes and water from a shack, and a young man digging through rubble with his hands, pulling out pieces of limestone and stacking them neatly to use later in rebuilding his house. “They are much better than the new ones,” he told me.
Across Syria, there are thousands of streets like this one. A year after Bashar al-Assad fled the country and his regime collapsed, nearly 3 million Syrians have returned from abroad and from refugee camps in the north. Many have drifted back into ghost neighborhoods—places without water or electricity, where darkness swallows entire blocks. With housing scarce, inflation soaring, and rents skyrocketing, many have no choice but to seek shelter in the wreckage of their former homes. The destruction is so vast that rebuilding even a single neighborhood would be daunting under the best circumstances. But people are trying.
In Amiriya, a man in dirty black jeans and a red T-shirt that read “Burn Your Past” on the back waved me over. “Don’t talk to him,” he said, nodding toward the kebab stall. “He stole a bag of cement from me.”
He introduced himself as Abu Arab and pointed to a roofless corner building—his family home, he said, which he had just moved back into after 13 years. The structure stood with its columns and floor slabs exposed, scarred by years of fighting. But there were signs of recent work: a new cinder-block wall on one side and freshly fitted metal shutters.
He pushed through the door and led me into a dark corridor lined with bags of cement. “They keep stealing them, so now I have to sleep here to guard them,” he said, his oily black hair falling across his forehead. We picked our way up the stairs. Some sections had collapsed; others he had recently repaired. I held onto the edges for balance. “Be careful,” he warned. “Don’t lean on the wall—it’s buckling.”
He climbed nimbly despite a pronounced limp, and I followed him into a small corner room on the third floor. The roof was gone, opening to a pale autumn sky. “This was my room,” he said. “My desk was here on the left, a single bed on the right, and a narrow cupboard in between.” He gestured as if he could still see the furniture, still remember its colors and smells. “It was the smallest room in the house, but I wasn’t married then,” he added with a faint smile. His wife and children were staying in a rented apartment in the hills outside Amiriya, waiting for him to finish work on the house before they could join him.
The walls were black with soot and punctured with holes larger than typical bullet marks. He led me to one and told me to look through. “This was a sniper’s position,” he said proudly. “It overlooks the whole area. My cousin was stationed here for a while.”
A local politician in Aleppo, who asked not to be named, told me that nearly two-thirds of the city lies in ruins. The destruction is so extensive that it will take years just to clear the rubble, let alone begin rebuilding. He said it would take decades for Aleppo to return to what it was before the war. All the reconstruction…So far, reconstruction efforts have been local and individual, with people like Abu Arab trying to rebuild their own homes and businesses. He believes this unorganized restoration is dangerous, as most of these buildings are structurally unsound. “But what can people do?” he asked. “They can’t afford rent and don’t want to live in tents anymore.”
Amiriya, which stretches across a line of hills on the southern outskirts of Aleppo, emerged in the second half of the 20th century. During this time, the city—like many others in the region—began expanding, absorbing neighboring towns and villages, turning orchards and fields into vast working-class districts of identical concrete blocks.
Abu Arab told me his father, a medic, built their house himself in the early 1980s. It was a multi-story building with a basement, ground-floor storerooms, and three floors above for his wife and children. “He used the best-quality concrete to cast the columns and floors,” Abu Arab said, gently patting the wall.
After the family moved in, the ground-floor garage and storeroom were converted into a clinic where Abu Arab’s father and elder brother worked, providing local remedies, injections, and medicine. The basement, like many others in the neighborhood, was packed with the family’s winter provisions: dried bulgur, olive oil, and rows of preserves and pickles in jars.
On the roof, his mother once tended a small garden of tin cans filled with basil, mint, and tarragon, and even a small lemon and olive tree. On warm summer nights, Abu Arab and his brother would sit for hours on the metal swing, smoking and breathing in the mingled scents of herbs and dust. From that rooftop vantage point, they would gaze at the lights of Aleppo, the highway snaking south toward Damascus, and the distant outline of the hills. But most of all, they watched the city itself—a sea of blinking lights shimmering into the night.
For 5,000 years, Aleppo has been a great metropolis at the heart of a region stretching from the Mediterranean shores, across the fertile lands of what is now southern Turkey, all the way to Mosul in modern-day Iraq. Throughout the centuries, Aleppo prospered as a trade hub and manufacturing center. It endured invasions, plagues, civil strife, and natural disasters, yet managed to preserve a distinctive character evident in its architecture, cuisine, and the social fabric of its multilingual, multi-ethnic communities—all of which could be observed in the old souks of al-Madina, the historic city center.
In 2011, when demonstrators and later rebel fighters filled Syria’s streets, Aleppo’s lack of revolutionary zeal and the near absence of protests in the city became first a source of ridicule and later of anger at the population’s perceived indifference. Finally, in the summer of 2012, more than 15 months after the start of the Syrian uprising, a coalition of rebel groups advanced on Aleppo from their staging grounds in the surrounding countryside. “We had to force the people into the revolution,” one rebel commander, a native of Aleppo, told me at the time.
When the fighting reached Aleppo, Abu Arab’s family abandoned their home. Like many residents in their neighborhood, they initially believed they would be able to return soon. Instead, they soon joined the exodus of Syrians fleeing the war. Abu Arab still remembers and grieves the belongings they left behind, especially the ton and a half of tomato paste his mother had spread out on the roof to dry for the winter. “You know how we Halabis [Aleppians] care for these things,” he said, smiling and patting his large belly.
The urban warfare that followed, some of the most brutal in recent memory, was shaped by the very architecture ofThe neighborhoods built by men like Abu Arab’s father were designed with narrow streets, close balconies, and boxy buildings that provided clear lines of sight—making them perfect for snipers. A single shooter on a rooftop or hidden in a corner room could control entire blocks. The long, tight streets became deadly passages. To counter this, rebels dug tunnels underground, first for supplies and escape, then filled them with explosives and detonated them, collapsing whole buildings into the ground.
During breaks in the fighting, Abu Arab—who was staying with his family in an unfinished concrete building across the hills facing Amiriya—would return to his home. Like other civilians, he had to cross the frontlines, passing through government and then rebel checkpoints, before sprinting across alleyways controlled by snipers.
Each time he arrived, the house was worse than before. “First the neighbors broke in,” he said. “They took things like the gas canisters. That was fine—people needed them.” But slowly, everything was taken. Even the metal swing he loved from the roof was gone. “When I saw them going through my mother’s and sister’s clothes, our family photos and papers, even my father’s certificates…” He stopped, unable to go on.
In those years, the lives and homes of civilians became deeply intertwined with those of the fighters. At night, fighters slept in seized apartments where the owners’ belongings still lay scattered. Empty food containers, spilled rice, and plastic bottles mixed with piles of women’s clothing.
Fighters smashed holes through apartment walls to create makeshift corridors. Once, while reporting in Aleppo, I followed a group of insurgents through one of these passages. They climbed through a hole into a kitchen, stepping onto the marble sink. The fridge door hung open, filled with rotten vegetables. Jars of pickled olives and chilies sat untouched on the shelf.
From the kitchen, we walked down a hallway covered in white dust and boot prints, then into a child’s room where toys were neatly stored in a blue plastic box. Through another hole in the wall, we entered a neighbor’s bedroom, stepping over piles of clothes and women’s shoes on the floor. The journey reminded me of cross-section diagrams from architecture school.
After anti-Assad fighters retreated in 2017, Amiriya became one of the many ghost suburbs around Aleppo: rows of hollowed-out buildings with peeled-back facades, concrete slabs jutting out like broken ribs, and skeletal structures rising from rubble like tombstones. In many areas, the regime barred residents from returning to former rebel-held districts, especially those with military value. Military commanders “sold” entire blocks to contractors, who stripped everything of worth—cables, pipes, switches, rebar—leaving behind only large portraits of the dictator in sunglasses, looking down as if admiring the thorough job his men had done.
For decades before the civil war, Aleppo stayed largely separate from the ideological conflicts that shook Syria. One notable act of resistance came when the Old City was threatened by a modernization plan that would have destroyed historic quarters. Despite the Ba’athist regime’s oppressive rule, Aleppians successfully opposed the project, securing UNESCO World Heritage status for the Old City in the 1980s.Aleppo preserved its historical identity into modern times more than any other city in the Middle East. This wasn’t just about protecting old buildings and artifacts, but also about keeping the Old City as a living, breathing center of economic and social life, where traditional crafts continued in ancient workshops. The Old City and its famous al-Madina souk—the world’s largest covered market—remained the entrepreneurial heart of Aleppo, centered around its historic khans. These khans were two- or three-story complexes built around a central courtyard, serving as places where merchants, pilgrims, and travelers could rest, stable animals, store goods, and trade. They ranged from simple roadside inns to lavishly ornate complexes funded by the city’s wealthy families and rulers.
Late last year, in the maze of the souk’s covered alleyways, I found a man named Annas sitting in the courtyard of his old khan with one of his sons and two merchants. The khan was in ruins. In 2023, an earthquake struck the region, causing severe damage to an Old City already weakened by years of war. As we spoke, Annas’s emotions swung between pain, as he recounted his own losses and those of his city, and the exhilaration of being back in the old souks.
Before the war, Annas was a moderately wealthy businessman who owned garment factories in the Old City and several properties across town. Back then, he liked to arrive at the khan first, before the covered market filled with noise and crowds. He would look around the courtyard, admiring the graceful arches and tall windows. If he craned his neck a little, he could glimpse the slender 16th-century minaret of a nearby mosque.
Once the fighting in Aleppo began, it was only a matter of time before the historic districts burned. The first fires tore through parts of the al-Madina Souk in 2012. Sections of the Great Mosque were consumed by flames, and the library in its eastern wing, home to invaluable manuscripts, was incinerated. Soon after, the minaret collapsed. One by one, khans, hammams, and buildings of immense historic and religious significance vanished. As rebels dug tunnels beneath the ancient quarter, enormous underground charges detonated beneath Ottoman-era barracks, sucking entire structures into the cavities created by the blasts.
Annas says he had little interest in politics when the uprising began in 2011. It wasn’t until a year later that he was radicalized, after a humiliating incident at the hands of Assad’s police. They beat him, arrested him, and forced him to kneel on the ground in his beloved souk in front of other merchants. After an $800 bribe, he was released. But he told me that this one moment of public shame set him on a path he could not escape. “On that day, I decided I would sacrifice my life, my wealth, even my children’s lives, to topple that regime,” he said. He went on to form a small rebel group made up mainly of local people from the Old City: some of his factory workers and even a few of their sons. They based themselves in the alleyways of the souks, around the Antakya Gate.
Eventually, in 2017, after the rebels retreated from Aleppo, Annas smuggled himself into Turkey and decided to start over, doing what he knew best: making garments. The business thrived, and after a few years, he made enough money to settle his children into their own apartments and expand his operation.
Yet the pain of exile never left him. Every night he sat with his family, repeating the same stories of his father’s and grandfather’s journey into Aleppo and its old souks, and of how everything they had built there was now gone. “Even my wife and sons were bored with me repeating the same old stories about Aleppo,” he told me. “I had no one left to tell these stories to except my youngest.”Every Sunday, he would take his grandson to a park in Istanbul and tell the same stories: “We had lands and factories in the greatest city in the world.” The boy would listen quietly. Sometimes he would say, “Jido [grandad], I know all that,” but he never complained.
The al-Madina Souk is a network of smaller markets, each dedicated to a trade: spices, ropes, olives, fabrics, and so on. Nine of the 54 souks have been renovated. When I visited, they were bustling again—shoppers jostling, merchants shouting, porters clearing paths with their pushcarts, customers testing underwear by pinching the fabric between thumb and forefinger.
But many souks remain in ruins. Grass grows on the collapsed roofs of stalls; domes have fallen, casting jagged shadows. Shop shutters are still twisted and bullet-riddled. In one ancient khan that served as a barracks during the war, iron bars from elegant facades now prop up half-destroyed walls. Inside, I saw stacks of sandbags, rusted cans of army rations, and filthy mattresses. A vaulted ceiling was blackened by fire, its plaster punctured by bullets, like stars sparkling in a dark sky. In the middle of what was once a busy thoroughfare, an old guard’s sofa sat abandoned.
At one point, as I walked down a dark alley, the sound of a drum rose from a hammam. A small crowd gathered as young men danced a groom toward his wedding party. Some hurried past the ruins toward the renovated souks, while others lingered to take selfies.
In one of the oldest and most magnificent khans, a dozen young men crouched in semi-darkness, shaving soap bars into perfect cubes, as if war had never touched the city. But outside, ruins and rubble stretch for hundreds of meters on either side. Some ceilings are still charred; others have been repaired. Some renovations are delicate and respectful of the old structures; others look like shopping mall corridors. Even in the souks that are still burned out, where entire market lanes sit dark and abandoned, men have returned to sit on plastic chairs outside their ruined shops—waiting, watching, refusing to leave the place that once defined them.
Annas told me his newest challenge comes from far away: China. Since the fall of the regime, customs duties have been removed and tariffs slashed, flooding the old markets with cheap imports and crippling Aleppo’s remaining industries. “If they don’t stop the imports, I won’t be able to reopen my workshops,” Annas said. “Do you know how many people it takes to make a single bra? There’s the one who sews, the one who glues the sponge, the one who attaches the elastic, and then…” He stopped, counting on his fingers. “Thirty-five people. Thirty-five people work to make one bra.”
He looked around the ruined courtyard, at the broken arches and fallen stones. “I don’t need the UN or the Americans,” he said. “Just close the border to Chinese goods, and we’ll find work for thousands.”
In recent weeks, two Kurdish enclaves in Aleppo have come under fire, and reports say over 300 Kurds have been detained. These areas were considered relatively safe during the war and are packed with people—Arabs, Kurds, and Christians—who fled when their homes were destroyed. A local politician I spoke to has been negotiating safe passage for civilians trying to escape this new fighting. “I can see the columns of smoke rising from Sheikh Maqsoud, and the scenes of people fleeing are breaking my heart. It’s like the early days of the war,” he said.
He believes the recent violence stems from the two sides being unableReaching a solution remains difficult. “The government cannot accept armed groups within the city [the Kurds], and the Kurds refuse to surrender their weapons because they distrust the government.”
A man collects stones from the rubble to reuse them in the Amiriya district of Aleppo. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad/The Guardian
Walking through Aleppo’s ruins, it often feels as though the conflict never ended—as if snipers could still be watching from their hiding places. Cities like Beirut, Sarajevo, and Mosul seem to live perpetually in the shadow of their past wars. Perhaps the only way to overcome that fear is not by wiping away the ruins and starting fresh, but by following Abu Arab’s approach: confronting the destruction bit by bit, fixing a frame, fitting a door, patching a wall, reclaiming the ruins brick by brick.
I asked Abu Arab if he had tried to return and live in his house after the fighting in Aleppo ended in 2017. He said yes. A few months after the rebels departed, he attempted to go back. This time, he found it occupied by a unit of government soldiers. The walls were black with soot, and anything that hadn’t already been looted was now gone. The soldiers didn’t believe he was visiting his family home. They detained him immediately, strung him up by his arms from the ceiling, and began interrogating and torturing him: Hadn’t this house been used by terrorists? Who were they? Did he allow them to set up a sniper post upstairs?
His detention and torture were brief. The soldiers found nothing on him, except that he had never finished his mandatory military service. He was quickly conscripted and sent to serve in the army for two years. During one battle, he was wounded in the leg—an injury that never fully healed. (That is why he limps.) After that, he waited for the regime to fall before daring to return.
Before leaving, he led me into what must have once been the living room. It was filled with old soldiers’ mattresses and trash. From behind a paint can, he pulled out the flag of the former regime: red, black, and white with green stars.
“Why do you still keep it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You never know what might happen in this country.”
“Do you really think Assad might come back?” I asked, surprised.
“I don’t know,” he replied quietly. “We have seen a lot… and been burned many times.”
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Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about From the ashes can Aleppo rise again designed to cover a range of perspectives and information levels
General Understanding
Q What does From the ashes refer to in this context
A Its a metaphor for the catastrophic destruction Aleppo suffered during the Syrian civil war particularly the brutal 2016 battle Ashes symbolize the ruined buildings lost lives and shattered society from which the city must try to rebuild
Q Is this about the ancient history of Aleppo or its present
A Its primarily about the present and future While Aleppos ancient history is central to its identity the question focuses on whether it can recover from the very modern devastation of the 21stcentury war
Q Why is Aleppo so important
A Aleppo is one of the worlds oldest continuously inhabited cities a UNESCO World Heritage site and was Syrias industrial and economic powerhouse before the war Its fate is seen as a symbol for the entire countrys potential recovery
The Recovery Process
Q Is Aleppo being rebuilt right now
A Yes but in a limited uneven and controversial way Some infrastructure is being repaired and some markets have reopened However largescale organized reconstruction of residential areasespecially for the poorestis very slow and often done informally by residents themselves
Q Who is leading the rebuilding efforts
A Primarily the Syrian government with allies like Russia and Iran and some international NGOs However widespread international sanctions and a lack of political resolution limit major foreign investment or aid from Western countries and institutions
Q Can the ancient parts of the city like the Old City be restored
A There are significant efforts to restore cultural heritage sites like the Grand Mosque and parts of the souk led by organizations like UNESCO This work is crucial for identity and tourism but its painstakingly slow and expensive
Challenges and Complexities
Q Whats the biggest obstacle to Aleppo rising again
A There isnt one single obstacle but a combination the
