Syrian rebels in the historic city of Homs are leaving behind a panorama of destruction

Reporting from Homs, Syria —  His shop is one of the few open for business in Homs’ ancient quarter, once this provincial capital’s vibrant heart, now a ghost town of crumbled buildings and desolate storefronts pockmarked by shrapnel and bullets.

“I was a well-to-do merchant, it’s true,” says Mohammed Ali Nouh, 36, a hulking man with an easy smile and no trace of rancor in his voice. “But some people came and destroyed everything. I don’t know why.”

Nouh recalls a time of prosperity and goodwill before the “events,” the operative metaphor for Syria’s punishing, sectarian-fueled conflagration, now in its fifth year. These days, to make ends meet, the father of three supplements his income working night security at a hotel.

His small Old City apparel shop, which has been in his family for more than eight decades, once prospered on sales of wedding gowns, cocktail dresses and gaudy jewelry, essentials for Homs’ long-established mercantile elite. But these days he trades in undergarments, socks and other basics, reflecting the shifting needs of a much-diminished clientele.

Still, he named his 1-year-old daughter Amal, or hope, a sentiment he professes to harbor for his broken hometown against all odds.

“I am fine; my family has survived,” says Nouh as he pulls up the shutters on his narrow emporium, the only open business on the once-bustling street. “And I am ready to rebuild my country.”

Last week marked a historic juncture in Homs, which sprang from obscurity to global notoriety in 2011 as the “capital” of the uprising against the government of President Bashar Assad.

The city’s last rebel stronghold, a besieged neighborhood of about 200,000 known as Waer, has finally begun reverting back to government control. The move comes after government and opposition negotiators, with help from the United Nations, worked out a complex deal to lift a lengthy army siege.

Under terms of the pact, more than 2,000 gunmen from various rebel factions began to decamp from Waer, where they have held sway for three years. Fighters eschewing a government “reconciliation” or amnesty offer are to be afforded safe passage to opposition-held terrain in northern Syria.

The process follows the contours of a U.N.-brokered accord that in May 2014 pushed gunmen from the historic Old City, paving the way for residents and merchants such as Nouh to return — though relatively few have trickled back because reconstruction has been minimal.

Homs, Syria’s third city after Damascus and Aleppo, will now be completely back in government hands.

For Assad and his backers, it is a significant victory, strategically and symbolically, at a moment when a Russian air campaign has boosted the fortunes of government forces and as outside powers push for a renewal of long-stalled peace negotiations. Homs sits close to key junctions to the Mediterranean coast, a government stronghold, and along the main highway from the capital, Damascus, north to Aleppo.

Yet Homs, a historic outpost of the Roman Empire and later a Byzantine hub, remains a deeply traumatized city in which huge expanses of rubble are all that is left of once-dynamic neighborhoods. And the city remains extremely vulnerable to attack despite heavy security: On Saturday, a car bomb packed with more than 300 pounds of explosives detonated near a hospital in the pro-government Zahra district, state media reported, killing at least 16 people and injuring 54.

Much of the prewar population of 2 million or so in the city and environs has fled, joining the legions of Syrians displaced in the country or scattered abroad, from Beirut to Stockholm, Istanbul to Munich.

The end of the siege of Waer, about two miles west of downtown across the Orontes River, should mark the district’s reintegration into city life. During the rebel occupation, snipers from both sides trained their rifles on Waer’s perimeters. Despite periodic truces, opposing camps have lobbed shells at each other, mostly injuring civilians.

A heavily guarded government checkpoint has provided the sole access to and from Waer, hosting an animated daily procession.

Hospital workers, teachers and others with jobs in Waer line up to enter, while students, shoppers, pensioners and others queue up in the other direction, bound for town.

Troops thoroughly search pickups ferrying produce into Waer for weapons or explosives hidden among the tomatoes, carrots and spuds.

Among the Waer residents crossing the checkpoint on a recent day to attend university was Nour Deeb, 19, limping on a prosthetic right leg. She was at home when a shell struck May 16, 2014.

“I woke up in the hospital and I had no feeling in my leg,” she says, giggling as she recounts an experience not out of the ordinary in a city where uncounted thousands have been killed or injured or have disappeared. “I realized I had lost my leg.”

In a surreal touch, a government-run bakery the size of an airplane hangar sits along the tense border between the two adversaries, its sizzling gas ovens churning out tens of thousands of circular flatbreads daily for consumption on both sides of the divide.

“Here we feed everyone; they are all our citizens,” declares the bakery manager, Hussein Amin, 59, a slim figure in a leather jacket dragging on a cigarette as fresh spheres of bread roll out assembly-line style behind him. “We don’t turn away anyone in need.”

Women covered in black — Waer’s Islamist overlords insist on veils — wait outside to purchase bags of the staple.

Occupying rebels in Waer have tightly controlled who could leave their domain, fearing a mass abandonment. Some trapped inside devised elaborate schemes to escape from the routine of roaming militants, government bombardment, food shortages, power outages and erratic school schedules.

One mother says she managed to spirit her children from Waer in January on a blustery, snowy day. She told rebel guards that her boy, Yasser, 12, was sick and had to see a doctor in the city, while her daughter, Yusfra, 15, had to meet her future mother-in-law. She put a faux engagement ring on Yusfra’s finger and left all the family belongings behind to avoid raising suspicions.

“To them [the rebels], it was normal that a girl that age would be getting married,” recalls the mother, speaking at a school turned shelter for the displaced in the Baba Amr district, where she and her children are living.

“At least we are safe here and my children can go to school,” said the mother, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Jasmin, for security reasons. “I want my kids to have something better for their future.”

Despite the current focus on Waer, the core of Homs remains the Old City, where an eerie silence prevails, broken occasionally by the sound of workmen patching a crumbling wall or reinforcing tottering buildings. The dense warren of Old Homs was once a vibrant and religiously diverse home to more than 300,000 people; fewer than 30,000 remain, according to official estimates.

“When I first saw the destruction in Homs, I cried,” says Samer Wardeh, 53, a construction crew chief who specializes in restoring the black basalt stone structures built by Ottoman-era craftsmen in the old souk. “How could it have happened?”

The souk’s specialty areas — including the gold market, the metalwork and woodcraft bazaars, the section featuring ladies’ goods — remain deserted. Shell holes perforate the souk’s metal roof, allowing beams of light to penetrate onto desolate passages and derelict kiosks.

Above the Old City, the view from the rooftops is profoundly disquieting. It’s a panorama of devastation; mosque minarets and church domes are interspersed amid the apocalyptic spectacle.

Inside abandoned buildings, some still reeking of long-extinguished fires, empty apartments and offices yield further evidence of a once-stable community shot to pieces.

The gutted apartment blocks housed Homs’ once-thriving merchant class. Remnants of their wares — cosmetics and clothing, mannequins, machine parts — still remain.

Glimpses of lost lives emerge. A playroom is littered with children’s illustrated English-language learning texts.

“Where do you want to go on Friday?” asks a cartoon-figure girl in a scout uniform in the lesson book.

“I’d like to go to the mountains!” responds a smiling boy.

Faded snapshots of a young man, from infancy to adulthood, lie scattered in another apartment. As a child, he is seen alongside his proud mother. In his 20s, he is savoring time with friends, in what looks like a marina. There is no other clue as to his identity or his fate.

A print of a verdant Alpine scene with snow-topped mountains still adorns the wall of what was once a family room.

A postcard recounts the pilgrimage to Mecca of another former resident.

“I am thinking of my family, I miss you so much,” the pilgrim writes in meticulous script.

“Please look at the pictures,” he says, referring to an array of photos of holy places on the flip side of the card. “These are very precious to me.”

Dozens of shell casings litter the floor of a bedroom that served as a perch for rebel snipers. Sandbags mark the spot where gunmen were stationed along a blown-out hole in the wall.

Graffiti from some forgotten “martyr’s battalion” on a wall declares, “We are all ready to die.”

That such a calamity befell the stolid municipality of Homs, long an industrial and agricultural center and site of a major refinery, still seems unfathomable to many residents. There is no easy explanation of the convulsive disintegration that abruptly tore apart the once-tightknit fabric — a place where a conservative Sunni Muslim majority coexisted peacefully with thriving communities of various Christian sects and Alawites, the Shiite Muslim offshoot sect whose adherents include Assad.

Minorities largely backed the government against the Sunni-led uprising. Tit-for-tat sectarian kidnappings and killings became commonplace; more than 2,000 people in Homs are still missing.

“We used to all live together here without problems,” says Abdelmajeed Hadi, 48, a carpenter and father of three, whose family is one of the few to have moved back into the ravaged Khalidiya district, just north of the Old City, after clearing several charred rebel bodies from their home. “Then this happened.”

Down a main drag in Khalidiya lined by mounds of rubble, a pair of women scavenge cotton clothes and sheets from abandoned buildings. It’s illegal — Khalidiya remains largely uninhabited and access is controlled by police and soldiers — but the officers look the other way.

“I don’t want my picture taken,” pleads one of the women, who gives her name only as Amalia, tears welling in her eyes. “I have five daughters. I don’t want them to see me like this.”

She trudges away with her bundle of scavenged fabrics perched on her head, a figure of biblical misery.

On a side street, Ibrahim Kasis combs through the remains of a century-old Syrian Catholic cemetery. The rebels who occupied the area took the time to deface all the crosses on the tombstones. Parishioners are seeking permission to remove the remains in the ancestral resting place.

“My family is all buried here: my brother, my mother, all of them,” says a distraught Kasis, a grandfather of six, stumbling through the graveyard.

“I came back here and my heart was weeping.... This is politics that has come to play on our heads!” he says, raising his voice in distress.

As the sun sets, a sole bicyclist winds his way through the passageways of the souk. The cyclist, a 38-year-old laborer, gives his name only as Abdul-Salam, confiding that he has relatives “on the other side.”

With dusk looming, he begins to pedal away with added urgency. “Too many ghosts here after dark” are his parting words.

The bicycle man fades into the shadows, past the spectral tableau of hollowed-out buildings and bullet-riddled storefronts, a solitary figure on the move as the night closes in on Homs’ Old City.