Traffic lights are blinking again, gleaming cafes are crowded, and Christmas lights twinkle in the corners of stone churches and lobbies of smart hotels.
But there are dark corners, too, in Homs, Syria’s third largest city. Entire neighbourhoods remain a haunting landscape of blackened buildings pockmarked by gunfire or flattened by ferocious bombardment into grey pancakes. Homs is a place where the return of light startles and the darkness still shocks.
Last week the city that witnessed some of the first protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, and some of the fiercest fighting, became the first to return fully into government hands. A local truce in the last rebel-held district of al-Waer saw the departure of the last fighters. Some 300 men, most belonging to the al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front, were bussed, under security escort, to an opposition stronghold in the north-west, where they will live to fight another day.
Their families went with them. Bewildered children clutching teddy bears were hurried to waiting buses by their mothers. “I don’t want to leave my home,” sobbed one woman, carrying with her whatever worldly goods she could manage. “But my son is a fighter, so I want to go with him.”
An official with the UN, which backs this agreement, tried to console her. “You’ll come back some day when there is a ceasefire across Syria.” But the woman was inconsolable.