A fifteen-minute walk separates the Bab Tuma gate from the ruins of Jobar. You start walking in the city that has been preserved and a kilometer later you cross an abyss and arrive at the one that has disappeared.
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Bab Tuma is the hustle and bustle of urban life, and Jobar the stillness of battlefields after a lost war.
Of course, the Islamist guerrillas who lost Jobar and the other suburbs ended up conquering Damascus and winning the war, while the defenders of the capital and the dictatorship fled or hid.
It is confusing, but that is how it is. Life begins to expand again in the city that has been saved, old Damascus, which survived because it had on its side the history and geography of political and religious power.
The new and peripheral Damascus, however, could not keep its buildings standing and life was extinguished. The city that was expanding through the oasis and the cultivated fields of Guta only had on its side the new Damascenes, low-income families arriving from all over who settled in precarious housing, built haphazardly. Inequality and lack of opportunities fueled resentment. There the revolution arose in 2012 and there it was crushed in 2018.
Jobar housed 300,000 people. Between 2013 and 2018 it lost them all. Bombs destroyed 95% of the buildings.
Entering today the uninhabited space of Jobar is to step into the end of the world, the land without men. If you continue walking east and cross the highway leading to Homs and Aleppo, you reach Ein Tarma, another rebel neighborhood. Here many buildings have resisted. They lost walls and windows, but the concrete skeleton still supports them, and it is among the bones of these giant frameworks that the most intrepid and desperate try to build a new home. They cover open spaces with bricks, plastics, and fabrics. They plant vegetables in the cracked earth and raise their gaze when the intruder passes by. These men and women inhabit a tiny limbo between victory and survival. We can describe it, but it is an unfathomable place.
The Government maintains the urban plans that the dictatorship designed for a loyal elite
On a second floor without walls, someone has hung laundry between two columns. Clean clothes and several flower pots transform the open space into a home. The toilet consists of black plastic bags that are lowered to the street and pile up where dogs sniff and everything decomposes.
Living like this, in the normality of the incomprehensible, forces us to ask a difficult question. How does destruction transform the character of people and nations?
Political scientist Gabriel Garroum Pla has several answers: “When destruction occupies the center of the relationship between the State and society, sectarian differences increase.”
The survivor, dispossessed of everything the war has taken away, needs to belong. Family, clan, ethnicity, religion, and social class are the spaces they inhabit to reaffirm identity.
In Ein Tarma, the only public space that works is the mosque. It is full. The muezzin recites the call to prayer and his chant spreads from loudspeakers installed on rooftops. “Come to prayer, come to salvation. Allah is great.” The invocation is a balm, and this comfort explains very well why the reconstruction of any population begins with the mosque. “You need a mosque and a school for people to return,” analyst Amar Kahf had told me. It is the first step to reverse urbicide.
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Urbicide is the deliberate destruction of a rebellious city to make it uninhabitable and force the displacement of the population. The peripheries of Damascus, Homs, Aleppo, and Gaza are good examples. Gabriel Garroum Pla has studied them thoroughly. They go hand in hand with genocides.
“Assad – explains Garroum Pla – responded to the uprising with the siege of the populations of Eastern Guta, such as Jobar and Ein Tarma. Hunger is a powerful weapon of war. The dictator also used chemical weapons, and in 2018 the Russian air force ended seven years of Islamist dominance in this cradle of rebellion. Assad then allowed the last survivors to leave for the rebel stronghold of Idlib.”
The new authorities, those who left Idlib at the end of 2024 to occupy Damascus and overthrow the dictator, do not allow the people of Jobar to return. They say it is dangerous, that there are mines and bombs yet to detonate and that, in any case, the land is contaminated by explosives.
Like in other neighborhoods on the outskirts of Damascus, Jobar has an urban plan. It is valued at 21 billion dollars. It will cover 1,100 hectares. Office and residential towers, green and commercial areas one kilometer from Bab Tuma. People who prove ownership of a destroyed home are offered 50% of its value, but not in cash but in shares of the real estate developer. It is very difficult for them to buy an apartment in the new Jobar. The square meter will be around 2,000 dollars and they are very poor.
The price per square meter is the line that separates life from mere survival, and the vast majority of Syrians are below it. “The State has no money. The war took away 80% of the GDP,” says Farah al Shami, researcher at the Arab Reform Initiative. 90% of the population suffers extreme poverty and only four out of every hundred people receive 20 dollars a month in social aid. “The stigma of poverty is very pronounced and will create political tensions,” she predicts.
The Government maintains the urban plans that the dictatorship designed to modernize the periphery of Damascus at the expense of its inhabitants. Private initiative allies with political power to create a new elite loyal to the regime.
The most advanced project is called Marota, which means homeland in Syriac. The dictatorship recovered pre-Islamic roots to combat the rise of political Islamism. The new regime has maintained the business plan, which is also a political plan.
Marota is an example of dubaification , tall towers, like in Dubai, without social context. The architecture of globalization offers comfort in a cultural void.
Garroum Pla argues that, without social policies, the glass towers will accentuate inequality. Grievance will drive dissent and not even the most authoritarian system will be able to end it. “Dissent usually hides at ground level – he explains – among people who must challenge the order to survive.”
Violent resistance, with a strong social and religious identity, brought the Islamists to power. What will the disinherited do now, all those who are below the price of a square meter on the outskirts of Damascus.
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