Syrian civilians return to ravaged town retaken from IS

Bassam Dabbas did not think he would survive to see his hometown of Al-Qaryatain retaken when Islamic State group jihadists seized control and captured him and hundreds of other Christians.
Now, around eight months later, he stands in the charred remains of the Mar Elian church where he once used to pray, and struggles to digest that he has returned to see government forces in charge.
"I have just come back today," the 55-year-old mechanical engineer told AFP. "I still haven't seen my house."
Al-Qaryatain was once viewed as a symbol of tolerance where Christian and Muslim communities had lived together for centuries, but when the extremist fighters of IS arrived last August all that changed.

Dabbas was one of some 270 Christians rounded up and transported around 90 kilometres east deeper into the Syrian desert and locked up by IS in an underground dungeon.
"You cannot believe their behaviour: there is no human behaviour at all," Dabbas, who dreams of restarting his small business making raisin butter, said in broken English.

"It's hard to believe that I am still alive."
Luckily for the group, after 25 days most were released -- Dabbas does not know why -- and he returned to Al-Qaryatain before eventually fleeing IS-controlled territory for a government-held village near the central city of Homs.

Now, just five days after regime forces recaptured the town in what appears to have been ferocious fighting, he is one of a small trickle of the roughly 30,000 people that used to live here who have begun to return.
They have found streets filled with rubble, ransacked houses with holes blasted in them and a ghost town that will take a long time to rebuild.
Just off a central square, Faisal AbhelRahim shows journalists through the home he has just come back to.
The living room ceiling is smashed in, the kitchen is in chaos and a lot of possessions have been looted.

"I am very sad to see it like this, it is very painful," he said.
"We hope the Russian and Syrian armies return security to this town and then we can rebuild everything again."
The capture of Al-Qaryatain is part of a broader offensive that has seen Syrian government forces backed up by Russian firepower retake the historic city of Palmyra -- some 100 kilometres to the northeast -- and delivered a major propaganda coup for both Damascus and Moscow.
Russian soldiers yesterday handed out food packages to civilians from the back of an army truck in front of the cameras of journalists on a tightly controlled visit organised by the defence ministry in Moscow.