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In Syria’s ‘barrel bomb capital’ Darayya, housing crisis stalls return

Around 25,000 people have returned to Darayya, just south of Damascus, since the regime fell. Destruction and a worsening housing crisis prevents the return of others to the battered city, home to 350,000 people before 2011. 


31 January 2025

DARAYYA — Ghida Matar, 32, knew Darayya was mostly destroyed before she returned from Lebanon on December 31, weeks after the Assad regime fell. Still, what she found in her hometown just south of Damascus was worse than she expected, leaving her “stunned.”

“The percentage of habitable buildings is 15 percent at best—habitable, not decent or good,” Matar told Syria Direct. She found her own childhood home destroyed, and had to find another place to stay with her mother, sister—whose husband is missing—and her sister’s children. 

Not long before, Kamal Shehadeh, 37, also returned to Darayya with his wife and three children. Though their home there is largely destroyed, coming back marked the end of a 12-year sojourn of displacement in Idlib, northwestern Syria. 

When the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-led Military Operations Department launched an offensive against the Assad regime on November 27, 2024, Shehadeh followed each new development, “moment by moment.” With “the liberation of each new area, the hope [of return] grew, and we breathed a sign of relief,” he told Syria Direct

“I have no words to describe how I felt the moment the regime fell” on December 8, 2024, Shehadeh said. “Our joy was indescribable—what happened was like a miracle. Even now, I don’t believe it. I wake up every morning and ask myself: Have we really returned to Darayya? Did the regime really fall?” 

After “Syria’s liberation,” Shehadeh immediately packed his belongings. His family was among the first to return to Darayya, a city dubbed Syria’s “capital of barrel bombs” in June 2016 by the United Nations’ Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the time, Stephen O’Brien. Over the course of nine days that month, the Assad regime dropped 309 barrel bombs on the city. 

Darayya was one of the first cities to rise up against Bashar al-Assad, holding its first demonstration on March 25, 2011, a few days after the Syrian revolution began. It paid an enormous price. 

From 2012 to 2016, Darayya was reduced to a ruin, “losing around 80 percent of its residential buildings,” Amer Ahmad Khashini, a member of the city’s civil administration, told Syria Direct. The civil administration is an administrative body formed after the regime fell and displaced residents began to return.

“Some areas, such as the al-Khalij neighborhood where around 10,000 families lived and the al-Jamaiyat area where more than 15,000 people lived, were completely destroyed,” Khashini added. “Around 70 percent of the al-Qabaliya neighborhood was also destroyed.” Few neighborhoods remain intact, and they too “were subjected to systematic, indiscriminate theft and looting,” he said. 

In August 2012, Darayya was the site of one of the largest massacres carried out by the Assad regime during the war. More than 700 people were killed, 514 of whom—including at least 36 women and 63 children—have been documented by name. Bodies of the remaining victims have not been identified, according to an investigative report published in 2022 by the Syrian British Consortium (SBC), an advocacy group based in the United Kingdom. 

Today, many of those displaced from Darayya want to come home, but the massive level of destruction stands in the way. Completely destroyed buildings “need a reconstruction plan” while those partially destroyed “need major repairs to be habitable again,” al-Khashini said. 

A woman inspects her house, partially destroyed by Assad regime bombardment, in the Reef Dimashq city of Darayya, 15/1/2025 (Abd Almajed Alkarh)

A woman inspects her house, partially destroyed by Assad regime bombardment, in the Reef Dimashq city of Darayya, 15/1/2025 (Abd Almajed Alkarh)

Worsening housing crisis

With Assad’s fall, thousands of displaced people began to return to their cities and towns from northwestern Syria. Many were shocked to find that the end of the regime was not enough for them to return home, given the scale of destruction in communities such as Homs, East Aleppo and many towns in the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus—including Darayya. 

Darayya’s population has risen from 100,000 people to 125,000 since the regime fell, according to figures Khashini provided to Syria Direct. While the population was three times higher before 2011—350,000 people—the influx “increased pressure on the infrastructure and created a suffocating housing crisis,” he said. 

The city already faced a housing crisis in recent years, which “became worse and more complex” with the fall of the regime and return of displaced people, Khashini said. “There are no more houses available to rent.” 

Shehadeh and his family have been moving around since returning to Darayya, staying with friends and relatives “even though their own circumstances are terrible,” he said. He has no other options, as he cannot afford to rebuild his destroyed house or rent another “due to the lack of availability and high rents.” 

Rents in Darayya currently hover between one million and two million Syrian pounds (between $180 and $190 at the current black market exchange rate). It is more than Shehadeh can pay, as he currently has no source of income, he said. 

Shehadeh sometimes finds himself pondering a return to Idlib, “the warm embrace during years of displacement,” given “the poor living conditions in Darayya: expensive prices, lack of housing, and if there is housing then a lack of heating.” Each time, he soon changes his mind. “Our people are in Darayya, and we must try to remain here by any means,” he said. 

Ammar Fayez, 32, was already living in Darayya when the regime fell, but found himself facing another challenge as residents returned. The owner of the house he lived in “returned, days ago, from an Arab country and asked me to vacate,” he told Syria Direct

Fayez had been paying the owner of his house SYP 250,000 a month in rent ($22). Today, he cannot find a house for less than four times that amount, which he cannot afford. 

A father of one, Fayez fled Darayya in 2012, at the time of the regime massacre. He returned in 2020 to find the two-story house he owned completely destroyed. The cost to repair it “is more than $20,000,” unaffordable for a plumber like him, so he rented the house he now has to leave. 

While he is happy that the regime fell and Darayya’s people are returning, Fayez did not hide his dissatisfaction with “the difficult conditions in the city, the lack of housing” as “many displaced people return and do not find homes to stay in.”

On top of the housing crisis, Darayya suffers from “poor services, especially in the health, water, electricity and internet sectors,” Khashini said. As a result, “many families are waiting, and have not yet returned.” 

No ‘emergency solutions’

Shortly after the regime fell last December, Darayya’s newly formed civil administration surveyed the number of completely or partially destroyed houses in the city, submitting its findings to the Reef Dimashq Governorate. It is now waiting “for the full picture of the new government’s role” in reconstruction “to become clear,” Khashini said. 

The civil administration’s current role is limited to surveying the damage. It has no “emergency solutions” to provide to those returning to the city, which, despite its pre-war population of 350,000, “can accommodate 200,000 at best, even after the partially destroyed buildings are restored,” he added. 

Multiple sources in Darayya told Syria Direct the civil administration, in coordination with the Military Operations Department, has temporarily housed many returnees in Masaken Saraya al-Siraa, a housing compound formerly inhabited by the families of regime officers. 

Located west of Darayya, between the towns of Moadamiyat al-Sham and Jdeidat Artouz, the complex sits on land expropriated by the Assad regime from its original owners. In itself, housing returnees in vacated apartments there cannot solve Darayya’s housing crisis, and could have other repercussions. 

The solution, as Fayez sees it, is to improve services and provide jobs in Darayya by “getting reconstruction going.” Shehadeh feels similarly. “I hope Arab countries and the international community will support this country and contribute to rebuilding it by investing and establishing factories,” he said. 

At a time when Syrians should “work together and join hands to build the country,” the international community should “lift economic sanctions” to help revive the economy and “help people meet their basic needs,” Shehadeh added. 

While the process of reconstruction may help stabilize destroyed cities and support returns, it cannot repair the emotional and psychological wounds of those affected by “the regime’s crimes over the past years,” Matar said. She fondly remembers the garden of her destroyed home, the site of “family gatherings and celebrations,” she said. “Every room holds a story, a tale.” 

“My father, a contractor, built our house with his own hands,” Matar added. “He died in Lebanon before he could return to Darayya and rebuild it himself.” 

This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson. 

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