Just over a decade ago, at the height of Russia’s bombing campagn in Syria in 2015, an old friend who had spent much of his career teaching in the Middle East sent me two photographs of the city of Homs, which had taken a particularly heavy bombardment at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s warplanes.

One of the pictures, which had been taken some years previously, was of a cafe on the centre of this city of 1.3 million. It was packed with smiling, well-dressed young men and women and hinted at a vibrant cafe culture in Syria’s third-largest city. The other was an aerial photograph downloaded from contemporaneous news reports which my friend confirmed was the street on which that cafe had sat. It was now nothing but rubble.

This week our Insights team has published this moving account by three peace and conflict researchers who have travelled through some of Syria’s shattered cities, to observe at first hand how people have been trying to rebuild their lives since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. They spoke with many people returning to these cities having fled the violence. They observed food stalls, cafes, repair shops and other small and medium enterprises that had sprung up amid the rubble as people began to rebuild their lives, homes and livelihoods.

The researchers, from the UK’s Durham University and the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies, attended the wedding of a friend and recount hearing the joyous zalghouta – the traditional high-pitched ululation so characteristic of celebrations across the Arab world.

As they write here: “hope and hardship coexist. So do recovery and destruction”. Or as someone told them when they visited Damascus:........

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