Syrians have begun trudging back into the Old City of Homs, where they dig among the ruins for the remains of lives shattered by heavy fighting and a grinding two-year siege that finally forced rebels to withdraw last month.
On one street a Syrian man strapped a red chair to his bicycle and pedalled around piles of rubble beneath buildings hollowed out by months of shelling. On another, two children in tattered clothes dragged on cigarettes as they hauled away scrap metal.
This apocalyptic landscape will be a testing ground for efforts by President Bashar Assad's government to resettle urban areas seized from the rebels and stitch Syria's shredded multi-sectarian tapestry back together, even as the uprising against him shows no sign of abating.
The government's victory in Homs, once dubbed the "capital of the revolution," came at a staggering cost. Months of heavy shelling in 2011 and 2012 gave way to a suffocating army siege in which the few thousand residents who remained in the Old City nearly starved to death, surviving for months on little more than weeds.
Block after block of bombed-out buildings, encompassing around half of Syria's third largest city, reveal the devastating onslaught unleashed by Assad's forces against an uprising that began in March 2011 as largely peaceful protests but eventually ignited a civil war. The fighting has claimed an estimated 160,000 lives and displaced more than nine million people.
On a scorching day earlier this month a young soldier with a black duffel bag clamoured over a hill of rubble that was once an apartment block in Homs.
"All I found were the verses of the Quran," he said, referring to framed pages that adorn many Muslim homes. When asked about the rest of his home he responded, "Leave it to God," before walking away.
In a former front-line area, a bulldozer had cleared paths through piles of rubble interspersed with artifacts of domestic life, the foamy contents of a mattress, pots and pans and a pink plate. Bullet-riddled shutters creaked and twisted in the wind.
A nearby sniper's nest held clues to the rebels' final days before the withdrawal. The room was stacked with sandbags and metal drums, the floor littered with a cigarette pack and an empty liquor bottle. "Assad's dogs died here," was scrawled on the wall.
The destruction brutally illustrates the imbalance of force between the government's modern army and the outgunned rebels. It also suggests the unravelling of sectarian relations as the war enters its fourth year. Christians and other minorities have largely stood by Assad, fearing the Islamic extremists that have assumed a powerful role in the Sunni-led insurgency.
The walls of the mostly Christian Majla area are scarred with bullets, but most buildings stand. The mostly Sunni area of Khalidiya, by contrast, is an expanse of shelled-out buildings and hills of rubble.
