It was around seven o'clock in the evening when we arrived at a church in the city of Hama, Syria, to attend the wedding of a friend. As guests gradually filled the courtyard, music began to echo through the building. One by one, the bride, groom, and their relatives entered the church accompanied by songs, applause and cheers.

After the religious ceremony concluded, groups of young men and women began performing Ewiha, a traditional wedding chant in Syria and the Levant. Their voices rose and fell in a rhythmic dialogue as verses praising the bride and groom were answered by equally poetic responses from across the room.

Each verse concluded with a joyful zalghouta – the high-pitched ululation that has accompanied celebrations across the Arab world for generations.

At first glance, there was nothing extraordinary about the wedding. Yet after more than a decade of war, the celebration felt like something more than a family gathering. It offered a powerful reminder that cultural traditions, social bonds, and everyday celebrations continue to endure, and that Syrians are trying to rebuild ordinary lives amid an uncertain transition.

But we were not in Syria to attend a wedding. As peace and conflict researchers, the three of us have long worked on questions of displacement, refugee return and post-conflict recovery; combining research on Syria with broader comparative perspective.

For this particular field trip, two of us, Bahadir and Zeynep, had spent the previous week travelling across Damascus, Rural Damascus, Aleppo and Raqqa observing firsthand how Syrians are navigating the country’s transition.

The journey, from June 1 to June 7, 2026, was part of a broader research programme that has involved more than 200 interviews over the past two years with Syrian returnees, internally displaced people, local officials, humanitarian workers and civil society representatives. These conversations, together with our wider research, have informed a series of peer-reviewed publications and policy reports on refugee return and reconstruction.

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For years, researchers had studied Syria from afar, unable to conduct fieldwork across government-controlled areas during the Assad era. Although we made several short visits to Damascus after the regime’s collapse, this was our first opportunity to travel across the country and observe firsthand how people were rebuilding their lives – and how Syria’s transition was unfolding beyond the headlines.

We encountered destroyed neighbourhoods standing alongside reopened shops. Abandoned industrial sites and damaged infrastructure coexisted with busy cafes and crowded restaurants. Communities continued to struggle with unemployment, rising prices and unreliable electricity while many people nevertheless spoke cautiously of hope and new beginnings.

Read more: ‘My home city was destroyed by war but I will not lose hope’ – how modern warfare turns neighbourhoods into battlefields

The contrast captured something important about Syria today: hope and hardship coexist. So do recovery and destruction.

Between recovery and ruin

The scale of the challenge remains immense. More than 90% of Syrians live below the poverty line, and nearly 16.5 million people in Syria need humanitarian aid, alongside 2.5 million returnees.

Almost a quarter of the country’s housing stock has been damaged or destroyed, and reconstruction costs are estimated by the World Bank to exceed US$200 billion (around £150bn). Yet international support remains far below what is needed: as of mid-2025, the UN’s humanitarian response plan had received only a small fraction (14 %) of its required funding.

Food insecurity affects millions of people, while years of conflict have severely weakened the country’s productive capacity.

These figures help explain the scale of Syria’s crisis, but they reveal little about how it is experienced in everyday life. That became much clearer during our journey: in conversations over tea, on long drives between cities, while walking through damaged neighbourhoods, and in discussions with residents, civil society representatives, local officials and business owners. Across these encounters, one impression emerged again and again.

Many Syrians welcomed the political changes, but few believed that political change alone would improve their lives. Economic concerns dominated almost every conversation.

Basic infrastructure remains under severe strain, with large parts of the country’s electricity, water and sanitation networks still non-functional. More than two million children remain out of school, while a shortage of teachers continues to undermine the education system.

Yet the challenges facing Syria are not distributed evenly.

What struck us most was how fragmented people’s experiences of the war had become. The contrast between affluent neighbourhoods such as Abu Rummaneh and heavily damaged areas like Jobar in Damascus could hardly be greater. The availability of basic services and living standards vary dramatically across regions, cities and even neighbourhoods. In Abu Rummaneh, restaurants are full, cafés are crowded and daily life appears relatively stable. Nevertheless, as one local resident told us:

“We sit on the ashes, and everything remains extremely fragile.”

“We sit on the ashes, and everything remains extremely fragile.”

Elsewhere in Damascus, entire districts still bear the scars of war. We were struck by how many residents had not visited Jobar since the fall of the Assad regime, despite living only a few kilometres away.

For many, the district remained a place known through photographs rather than personal experience. We were equally surprised to find that many humanitarian workers, NGO staff and policy professionals based in Damascus rarely ventured beyond the city’s central neighbourhoods. In many ways, Jobar felt as distant to them as it did to visitors from abroad.

These uneven realities are further complicated by the ongoing return of displaced Syrians. During a brief break between meetings, the Syria country director of one of the largest humanitarian organisations operating across the country welcomed us into her office.

As we cooled down with glasses of water and cups of coffee, after walking through the summer heat of Damascus, our conversation turned to the growing pressures facing Syria’s cities. “Returns to cities lead to rising prices, higher utility costs, more expensive housing and additional pressure on already scarce services”, she explained. For many returnees, settling in the capital is currently more feasible than returning to their original communities.

The individual stories reveal what return looks like in practice. For example, Ahmad, our local research assistant, returned from Turkey to Damascus immediately after the fall of the Assad regime, even though his hometown is Raqqa. Unable to find suitable employment there, he now works as a sports trainer at a youth centre in Damascus. Despite earning an income, he cannot afford to rent an apartment and instead lives in a room within the sports complex.

We heard a similar story from a taxi driver in Damascus who had returned from Turkey five years earlier after years of displacement. Originally from Idlib, he picked us up outside our hotel and, as we crawled through Damascus traffic, told us that despite holding a university degree, driving his ageing taxi was the only steady work he had been able to find.

“This taxi is my only reliable source of income,” he said, tapping the dashboard. “It constantly needs repairs, but without it, I wouldn’t be able to support myself.”

By the time he dropped us off in Bab Touma, our short journey had become another reminder that returning home is only the first step toward rebuilding a life.

On the road across Syria

Our journey towards Rural Damascus, Aleppo, Raqqa and Hama began at 7:30 on a warm Damascus morning, when Ahmed - our driver, research assistant and guide for the days ahead........

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