The Syrian city of Homs seeks to rebuild, but old wounds remain open

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

Now 20 years old, the university student joined the joyous celebrations that took over the streets of Syria last Sunday for the end of Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

His two sisters, Ala and Jana, nod as we sit, squeezed on this cold winter day, on a lumpy old sofa in their humble home in Homs.

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

Almost a decade ago, we met for the first time in the worst days of that war, fought in the name of your president.

Baraa, a deeply traumatized girl whose eyes darted frantically from side to side, struggled to speak at that moment.

“Sometimes people killed cats for food,” he said. as she sat in a disused banquet hall filled with aid officials, Syrian security forces and distraught families.

For months, many had little to eat except grass torn from the ground, tree leaves boiled in salt water, and sometimes cinnamon.

“Instead of learning to read and write, I learned about weapons,” Baraa then told us matter-of-factly.

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

Baraa and his family were among a thousand civilians rescued from the Old City during a rare UN-supervised humanitarian pause in February 2014.

Somehow they survived the agonizing two-year siege of the old neighborhood where Syrian troops imposed their first “surrender or starvation” cordon in this ruthless war.

This medieval torture tactic became one of their cruelest weapons, unleashed against one rebel stronghold after another.

Months later, more civilians were also given safe passage out of the Old City, as well as fighters who moved on to continue their fight in other parts of Syria.

The years until this week have been hard for this family and many others.

“I felt like I was asleep and I lost hope,” Baraa recalls as she adjusts the white scarf she and her sisters wear. “We were always afraid of saying the wrong thing, even in college.”

Now, like so many Syrians, he brims with palpable joy and optimism in these heady first days of a new beginning.

“I’m dreaming of so many things now, finishing university, doing a master’s degree, improving my English.” His voice trails off as his grand goals fill this small, modest room.

A frightened girl whose name means “innocence” had matured into an impressively confident young woman, dressed in trendy blue jeans and a light blue fleece.

Her loving father, whose name means happy, radiates pride. He managed to raise his daughters alone after their mother was killed by a rocket that crashed into their kitchen. It was the children who found her there, collapsed on the stove.

The meager profits they earned from their fruit and vegetable cart, as well as the kindness of their friends, kept them striving for a better life.

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

It’s a blessing for a country where the UN says 90% of Syrians live below the poverty line. “Nowadays I can even afford to buy meat,” he gushes.

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 Saydnaya prison. When the doors of this notorious Damascus prison opened wide last week, he did not come out.

This aching pain and exhilarating happiness are palpable, especially for Syrians who can now make a bittersweet return to Homs. Entire sections remain jagged cityscapes of gray rubble and open ruins.

“I needed to see this again, but it brings back painful memories,” says Dr. Hayan al-Abrash as his eyes scan the haunting landscape of loss in the Khalidiyah neighborhood, pulverized by Syrian fire.

He points out the skeletal remains of a towering building whose façade was brought down by a Scud missile. Two other buildings collapsed.

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

He struggles to locate it until a merchant appears to open and open a metal shutter. It reveals a destroyed warehouse with rickety metal stairs leading to a dark, dank basement.

“Yes, yes, this is it,” he declares excitedly as our flashlights illuminate the cavernous space, including another set of stairs. “Patients came in here,” he explains.

“Sometimes I would take my friends, my neighbors and my own cousin down these stairs.”

It’s next to a wall full of arrows pointing to the “emergency room” and “the road to death” – an even darker mood than this room.

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

Empty medicine bottles and dirty cardboard packages sit in a far corner of the room where the wall is charred.

“The regime lit that fire in revenge,” he says with growing emotion. “They feared doctors, lawyers and political figures even more than they feared fighters.”

“It makes me very angry to see this,” he emphasizes.

I ask him if that makes him want revenge.

“This is not the time for revenge,” he says. “It is a time to build Syria for everyone, but not for those who killed us and have blood on their hands, who must be judged.

“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 confirm this.

Dr. Hayan also takes us to see the site of another underground hospital in the Old City: it was in the spacious basement of a church where the walls are now lined with chairs and tables stacked for family gatherings.

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

The Dutch priest, murdered in the Old City when he refused to abandon its trapped and starving residents, is now buried in the grounds.

The current pastor, Father Tony Homsy, is surprised when we suddenly appear with Farhan, flanked by his daughters, excitedly scrolling through his phone to find photographs from that time.

The Syrian Jesuit priest leads us downstairs to the narrow room now used for daily mass, recently transformed into a Christmas grotto with a brilliant Nativity scene.

“This is a very beautiful story,” he marvels as our small delegation nearly fills the space. “In this grotto that 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 own family in the northern city of Aleppo for the first time in years.

He also dares to dream big. “It’s time to move on,” he says, 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.”