Damascus – Life is rebuilt between small gestures: markets that reopen, families that reinforce their homes, and workers that improvise businesses. In the midst of economic precariousness and daily routine, each daily act becomes a thread of hope, a year after the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

First modification: 12/06/2025 - 18:56 Last modification: 12/06/2025 - 18:58

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The morning in Damascus begins before the sun rises. In the southern neighborhoods, where the facades remain open like wounds, the city smells of old dust and roasted coffee. Electric generators roar at irregular intervals, setting the pace of a country that has not yet regained its pulse.

A year after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, life in the country's capital moves in a fragile balance: timid steps towards normality, but also a daily life surrounded by poverty, fear and uncertainty.

At the Bab Srijeh market, Hatem, a tarboush seller, arranges his merchandise on a table he repaired himself with metal pieces recovered from a demolished building.

“The lack of electricity doesn't affect us much,” he says with a shrug. "Our work is manual. But for others... for them it is more difficult. Although, thank God, the light is becoming more stable."

To his left, a young woman who sells clothes answers with determination: "Whoever says that the situation is not improving is not going out on the streets. Everything is going slowly, but it is going." The two speak without solemnity, it is their way of resisting.

This tenuous optimism contrasts with macroeconomic reality. Eight out of ten Syrians live below the poverty line, according to United Nations estimates. International sanctions and years of devastation have reduced the country to a survival economy: prices rise every week and the average salary barely covers a minimal part of the basic basket.

The Syrian pound, despite having shown slight stabilization in some parts of the year, remains deeply devalued. Various analyzes suggest that if the Syrian economy only grows around 1.3% annually, recovery to 2010 levels would take several decades, possibly more than half a century. It is a number that few repeat out loud, but that many feel in their stomachs.

When the regime fell, the new authorities promised reforms, investments and a safe return plan for the displaced. On paper everything sounded plausible. In practice, the country still appears too fragile to sustain such ambitions.

Recovery in the hands of its inhabitants

More than a million Syrian people had returned from abroad, UNHCR reported in September 2025; many only to find their homes reduced to cement skeletons.

In Hajar al-Aswad, one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in the south of the capital, the streets look like an incomplete map: windows without frames, collapsed ceilings, hallways that lead nowhere. However, families pass each other on their way back with mattresses, tools and buckets of paint.

“We return because we want to die where we were born,” says Abu Ahmad, a 68-year-old grandfather who sleeps in the only room he was able to prop up with the help of his children. "Here at least it's us."

State reconstruction, announced as a national priority, advances at the pace of a tired animal. Lack of financing, bureaucracy, shortage of materials and distrust of foreign investors block most projects.

The real restoration—the one that sustains life—is what is carried out by the neighbors themselves: small open workshops among rubble, improvised carpenters, women who reuse burned wood to reinforce windows or doors. In the absence of a solid system, the informal economy has become the backbone of everyday life.

In this landscape, minorities carry an extra weight. In neighborhoods where local property regulations are confusing or contradictory, many Kurds, Christians, Palestinians and families deemed "untrustworthy" by multiple administrations face obstacles in accessing aid or recovering their homes.

Community associations speak of an unequal return, in which the most vulnerable – single women, older people, young people without resources, religious minorities – are trapped between precariousness, lack of documents and fear of silent discrimination. The official narrative insists on inclusion, but reality shows that integration remains partial.

In the center of Damascus, more protected from devastation, signs of normality take on symbolic value.

In the newsroom of the state agency – renovated after the change of Government – ​​there is cautious enthusiasm. Inas Safwan, one of the new editors, seeks to open windows to more critical journalism.

"We want the press to be part of the transition," he says. "Not propaganda, but responsibility. But for that we need conditions: salaries, stable internet, real freedom." He pronounces it firmly, although he is aware that openness to information is still a gesture that is more aspirational than structural.

A city that breathes at intervals

Further east, in a cafeteria in front of the National Theater, young university students debate between sips of tea. They talk about scholarships, the Internet, the desire to travel, how the city "seems to wake up and go to sleep at the same time."

One of them, Samer, an engineering student, summarizes that contradictory feeling: "Before we had no future. Now we have one that is not clear. But it is the first time in years that we do not feel only stagnation." Even so, the conversation soon turns to fatigue: inflation, difficulties in finding work, resorting to temporary jobs and the constant risk of falling into irreversible poverty.

On the streets, life seems to resist by inertia. However, there are moments that break the monotony: a reopened book store in Shaalan, a modest wedding held in a makeshift hall with LED bulbs or a group of children playing among the ruins of a school. The city breathes at intervals, as if it were hesitating between sinking or being reborn.

The new Government insists that the priority is to attract foreign investment. They announce updated legal frameworks, promises of transparency, mixed funds for reconstruction. Experts doubt.

The country would need $216 billion to rehabilitate critical infrastructure—roads, hospitals, water networks, energy—according to World Bank estimates; and today it still depends on limited donors and an exhausted international community. Without firm regulatory guarantees and without a fully consolidated peace, foreign capital remains waiting. The transition continues to be marked by the structures that the war left behind.

At dusk, when the Sun hides behind Mount Qasioun, Damascus seems like another city: the shadows soften the scars of the buildings, the cafes are filled with families who, for a few hours, try to live as before. Even in this ephemeral oasis, one certainty persists: the reconstruction of Syria will not be a short race, but a long process, full of detours and setbacks.

It is not just about rebuilding houses, but about rebuilding the social fabric, regaining trust, facing invisible wounds. And although many Syrians prefer not to talk about the future, their daily gestures such as opening a store, cleaning a street or reoccupying a semi-destroyed house make up a stronger narrative than any official speech.

The Syrian transition does not have a clear path, but on the streets of Damascus, among ruins and minimal beginnings, life goes on. And that insistence, for now, is the most honest form of hope.

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