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After more than a decade of war, residents of the former rebel pockets surrounding the capital are rediscovering a ghostly neighborhood emptied of its population for seven years, where everything was destroyed.
It only takes a few minutes from the Abbasids district to see it take shape. Eastern Ghouta and its neighborhoods, a tangle of rubble northeast of the capital. On its doorstep, Jobar no longer has anything of the working-class Damascene suburb that it once was. More like a phantom limb, an urban carcass where a house is no longer habitable, where buildings still lean when they are not already lying down. “I know every inch of this neighborhood! boasts Abou Zakaria, a well-trimmed, gray-moustached Christian. We lived there like brothers.” Walking slowly through the street shrouded in stagnant dust, he tries to recognize the house he left a little over seven years ago.
When he left, the neighborhood was one of the last strongholds of rebels described as “terrorists” by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Shelled by the Bashar al-Assad regime's aircraft, it was recaptured from opposition fighters in 2018. It was also here that the regime fired sarin gas in April 2013. “Among us, who are the terrorists? he said in his hoarse voice. Who are those who destroyed this neighborhood? Look what the soldiers of our houses did. Throughout this street, they destroyed the stairs that lead to the first floor to prevent residents from returning to their homes. This is cruelty!” This is the first time he sets foot on the soil of Jobar, where he lived for thirty-five years. All the time
