In the war-ravaged Syrian city of Daraya, a remarkable story of survival and return is unfolding. Artist bilal Shorba has revisited his murals – created during the siege nearly a decade ago – and found them remarkably intact, a testament to the city’s resilient spirit despite years of conflict and displacement. This report examines Daraya’s ongoing recovery as residents return following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, confronting widespread destruction and the enduring trauma of a brutal civil war.
After the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, artist Bilal Shorba returned to the city of Daraya to discover that several of his murals, created nearly a decade ago to depict the experiences of siege, imprisonment, and the longing for freedom, had remarkably survived.
Daraya, once completely emptied of its residents during the peak years of the Syrian conflict, is where Shorba, 31, revisited one of his works on a crumbling wall. The mural, titled “Symphony of the Revolution,” portrays the evolution of peaceful protests into armed conflict with multiple factions. It depicts a girl in a white robe playing the violin, with a soldier aiming a rifle at her, and behind him, a fighter being pursued and falling under the sights of a gunman from the Islamic State group.
Shorba, who spent recent years as a refugee in Turkey before returning to Damascus after the new transitional authorities took power, described the survival of around thirty of his murals as “a victory.” “Despite the regime’s entry into the area and our displacement, those simple drawings remained – it’s an escape,” he said.
In March 2011, Daraya, located seven kilometers southwest of Damascus, was at the forefront of peaceful protests against the government. Demonstrators, including the activist Ghiath Matar, who was arrested and killed under torture, distributed roses and water to soldiers. However, as the situation escalated into a bloody conflict, Daraya witnessed a massacre in the summer of 2012, where 700 residents were killed by government forces and allied militias. The city was then subjected to a tight siege for approximately four years, leading to the displacement of all its residents – exceeding 250,000 people – as refugees and internally displaced persons, with many seeking asylum in Europe during a major wave of migration a decade ago.
In 2013, Shorba arrived in Daraya from neighboring Damascus to join the armed opposition. He carried with him “a small bag containing a sketchbook, colored pencils, and Victor Hugo’s *Les Misérables*, along with enough clothes for two or three days.” He didn’t anticipate the war would change his life, or that he would remain besieged with a few thousand Daraya residents for nearly four years, forced to cook weeds and herbs after Damascus blocked the entry of food aid.
In August 2016, the remaining residents and fighters were evacuated to the Idlib province. From Idlib, a key destination for opponents of Assad during the war, Shorba moved to Turkey, where he honed his artistic skills, remaining there until Assad’s removal from power. He now hopes to contribute, along with other artists, to “erase” the murals from the past that glorified the Assad family and the Ba’ath party, which had ruled the country with an iron fist for more than five decades.
Shorba explained that the new murals should “honor those who sacrificed, those who worked, and those who contributed to the liberation of Syria, and remind us not to repeat the same mistake: that one person should not replace or monopolize power, or harm others.”
Since 2019, after Assad’s forces regained control of large areas lost in the early years of the war, Damascus has allowed Daraya residents, particularly those displaced to surrounding areas, to gradually return following security checks. The majority of returnees have been women, children, and the elderly. As of December 8, tens of thousands of residents, including refugees from neighboring countries, have returned, among them doctors, engineers, workers, and farmers, bringing with them new experiences, skills, and resources.
Also returning are activists and human rights advocates who have experienced democratic practices and freedoms in host countries, freedoms they had never known in Syria. Daraya, a city from which the presidential palace is visible to the naked eye, encapsulates the tragedy of a war that has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled, infrastructure destroyed, and there are shortages of water, electricity, and communication in several areas. Only a quarter of the city’s wells are operational, and sewage overflows in numerous neighborhoods.
According to a survey conducted in April by the American Society of Syrian Engineers, approximately 65% of Daraya’s buildings have been completely destroyed, and around 14% damaged. The remaining buildings are habitable but require some renovation. Despite the devastation, Hossam Al-Laham, 35, did not hesitate to return with his family, which he formed in Idlib, and welcomed his youngest of three daughters, born in Damascus this year.
Al-Laham, who was involved in relief work in Daraya after 2011 before becoming a military commander and being evacuated in 2016, stated, “We decided to return to Daraya because we are the only ones capable of rebuilding our homes.” The man, who leads an initiatives committee within Daraya’s civil administration, added, “If we wait for the international community and organizations, we might never return. We are rebuilding our homes ourselves, but we need help with the infrastructure.”
The new authorities are relying on international support to launch a reconstruction phase, but priorities are numerous and available resources are limited. Returning to Daraya also means, for Al-Laham, who lost more than thirty relatives and friends during the war, honoring “the Syrians who paid a high price for their freedom.”
Al-Laham, who has resumed his studies in business administration, dedicates much of his time with volunteers to collecting aid and establishing contacts with organizations to secure funding for the rehabilitation of damaged facilities, including a school and a hospital. “I wake up every morning and tell myself… we need to find a new donor,” he said.
While military operations have leveled entire neighborhoods, such as the Al-Khalij district adjacent to the Mezzeh military base, other areas are partially destroyed and appear almost deserted, with movement limited to residents living in hastily renovated buildings. Still other neighborhoods, less damaged, resemble beehives, with workers on rooftops, renovating a school here and rebuilding a building facade there, while others work to repair a water pump or move furniture made in the city, where almost every neighborhood has a carpentry workshop.
The healthcare sector is among the most affected, with four hospitals having been taken out of service during the war, most notably the Daraya National Hospital, which opened in 2008 with a capacity of around 200 beds. Designed to serve more than a million people, the hospital is now a massive concrete structure rendered unusable by the bombing in the summer of 2016. Its contents were completely looted, with tiles, electrical wires, doors, and windows removed.
“There are no operating rooms or hospitals in Daraya today for emergencies,” Al-Laham said, adding that medical services are currently limited to a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders until the end of the year. He believes that “providing healthcare services would encourage people to return.”
Daraya’s doctors, specialists in various fields, have sought refuge in several countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and Europe. However, Dr. Hossam Jamous, 55, a specialist in ear, nose, and throat surgery, decided to return from Jordan with his family after they left in 2012. From his new clinic in Daraya, where he has displayed his credentials, some of which he obtained in Jordan, he said, “I expected great destruction, but not to this extent.”
In Jordan, the law prevented Jamous from practicing medicine, having left more than 32,000 patient files in his former clinic. He chose to volunteer with a charity and then a hospital affiliated with the Emirates Red Crescent. On the entrance to his new clinic, pierced by bullets, Jamous has placed a large sign bearing his name and specialties. After weeks of work, he has treated hundreds of patients, from children with tonsillitis to those suffering from “perforated eardrums or broken noses from beatings during detention.” He continued, “Just as I served the sons of my country as a refugee in Jordan, I am continuing the same service today in my country.”
Returning to Syria is also the goal of the *Enab Baladi* newspaper team, which published its first issues in Daraya in 2012 before moving to several countries, including Turkey and Germany. What began as a “dream idea” with a group of more than 20 young men and women, four of whom were killed during the founding phase, has become one of Syria’s leading independent platforms, now published online from Damascus.
Standing in front of a demolished house from which the zero issue was published, Ammar Ziadeh, 35, one of the newspaper’s founders and managing editor, said, “Our idea at the time was to publish a local newspaper in Daraya. We never expected it to expand and gain this presence on the media map in Syria.”
With the return of some of the platform’s team from abroad, where they developed their skills and expertise, and the addition of young journalists from diverse regional and religious backgrounds, *Enab Baladi*, according to Ziadeh, is working to produce “professional, independent content” after decades in which successive authorities imposed restrictions on journalism and turned it into a propaganda tool. Ziadeh hopes that “independent media will carve out a space for the freedom currently available” in Syria despite the challenges, adding, “We are pushing for it to be professional and able to convey the voice of the people and not be affiliated with or directed politically to serve political parties.”
Currently, around 200,000 people live in Daraya, according to the municipality, with eighty thousand having returned after the fall of Assad. Among them is carpenter Mohammad Nakash, 31, who brought his wife and children, Omar, 6, and Hamza, 8, who were born in Turkey, to meet his family and grow up in the city. Nakash, who defected from the army in 2012 and lost a brother in prison, works in a carpentry workshop owned by his father, a craft passed down through his family, like many others in the city.
Nakash said his children initially had difficulty integrating: “When we arrived here, they didn’t approach my parents and brothers,” prompting him to show them to three doctors, fearing they had autism. But after a few months, the children got used to their family and the neighborhood children and began attending a nearby school, along with 14,000 other students traveling daily between damaged buildings to 17 schools, out of a total of 24 that existed before 2011, according to a school official who requested anonymity.
The education sector today suffers from a severe shortage of teachers and equipment, and difficulties for students born in refugee countries. More than one million Syrians have returned since the fall of Assad’s rule, according to the United Nations, half of them from Turkey. The school official said that students coming from Turkey face “difficulty with the Arabic language, which they speak but do not write well,” prompting the educational administration to “organize courses in Arabic.”
Despite the difficulties and challenges, Nakash is trying to rebuild his life and hopes to rebuild his destroyed home. Daraya’s mayor, Mohammad Ja’nineh, said that citizens “have returned and found their homes destroyed, demanding that we provide shelter or support” to rebuild them. Many residents face a major obstacle in proving ownership due to the loss of documents, preventing them from rebuilding – a dilemma faced by Syrians in several cities.
In Daraya, destroyed buildings are not the only witnesses to the war era. In the “Martyrs’ Cemetery,” established during the war, lie the remains of 421 people from the city, identified by name, who were killed between 2012 and 2016. The cemetery also contains a mass grave containing unidentified bodies buried in large part after the Daraya massacre.
Several residents recounted how fighters and activists, before leaving, removed tombstones after photographing them, then covered them with dirt, fearing that government forces would tamper with them in retaliation. But upon their return, they reorganized the cemetery and replaced the tombstones based on the photos they had taken. “There is a bitterness in Daraya; a large part of the families do not know where their children are. My small family has no grave here. Today, I am struggling to get a grave for my three brothers,” said Aamneh Khoulani, a Daraya native and member of the National Commission for the Missing, formed by the new authorities, while visiting the cemetery.
Her brothers were arrested by the former government forces, and the family later learned of their execution. One of their photos appeared in the “Caesar Files,” which contained more than fifty thousand images of detainees who died in Syrian prisons during the period of suppression of peaceful protests. Tens of thousands of families in Syria are still waiting to learn the fate of their relatives who were arrested in the former regime’s prisons and did not emerge after its fall.
The issue of the missing is one of the most complex issues resulting from the Syrian war and requires years of work, documentation, and technical expertise not currently available locally. For months, Khoulani has traveled between Britain, which granted her family asylum, and Syria, where she dreams of building “a state of citizenship where justice and accountability for criminals are achieved.” The activist, who has spoken twice before the UN Security Council and works with several organizations, said, “After our previous struggle to get rid of Assad, we are now looking for graves. We want graves, and we want the truth. And we want to bury them in a way that honors them and preserves their memory.”
On a wall inside the cemetery, Shorba, after returning to Daraya, painted a mural depicting a girl holding a red rose, dreaming of placing it on her father’s grave. But her father, like many victims, has no grave.
