I returned to Syria in the summer and found something new: the quiet miracle of ordinary life. On a July afternoon, I stood on the edge of al-Hatab Square in the old city of Aleppo, filming, transfixed. A group of boys was kicking a soccer ball around the square. One kicked it out into the street, out of the frame, where it bounced off a parked car. Another ball appeared immediately from the other side. They shouted, laughed, and kept playing. It was an ordinary scene, but I couldn’t look away. 

The historic al-Hatab Square had been repaved a few years ago with broad, white slabs of limestone, ringed by a mix of gutted buildings and jarring white storefronts—the residue of nearly 14 years of war and the Assad regime’s failed attempts at reconstruction. For years, Syria had been defined by images of war: the deep bomb craters, the crumbled neighborhoods, the sprawling refugee camps. al-Hatab Square had been a fault line between regime and rebel territory in Aleppo during the particularly brutal years of 2013 to 2016. Many died crossing between the two sides. The regime’s aerial bombardment and the rebels’ underground explosions caused much of the destruction in the Jdeideh quarter, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that includes the al-Hatab Square. 

I had watched the aftermath of bombings many times during the war: the pillars of smoke rising from the rubble, the White Helmets rushing to pull ash-covered bodies from the wreckage, the brokenness that was left behind. Now boys chased soccer balls across the square that was once a battlefield. I thought of a video produced by the advocacy group Syria Campaign in 2014 that imagined this scene in reverse: beginning in the moments after a bomb fell and rewinding until the bomb shot back into the sky with an explosive boom, the camera panning down to children playing soccer in a square. Just like this one. 

In those moments in the square, you could squint and believe that fate had spared Syria the war. Yet all around me there were reminders; there was evidence. The yellowed stone planters that once held trees were gone. The old silver and gold shops, their facades blackened by time, were gone. What had once been dense and crowded was now open and disorienting. This was my fourth trip to Aleppo since the Assad regime fell in December 2024. Every visit evoked grief and fury, happiness and gratitude, disbelief and mourning. As time passed, these emotions grew quieter, and something new took their place.

Great expectations in Syria

Across the country, people offered wildly different accounts of how they felt 18 months after liberation. Some declared that........

© Time