Salah says he could hardly believe what he was seeing, as if the impossible had happened. His eyes fixed on the same streets—different, of course, after so many years—yet finally returning to what he once called home, the place of his birth.
And then it started to unfold: Salah, a middle‑aged Syrian man, returned this Saturday for the first time in eight years to his native Aleppo. “I don’t know how to describe it. It is something inexplicable. I left as many others did, after enduring the city’s siege in 2016, terrified by Russian airstrikes and by Shiite militias… But today, here I am. We are back,” he says. During those years apart, he lived only a few kilometers north of Aleppo, in the Azaz region, which was under rebel control.
Only a few kilometers away, a line—the front line—felt like an impenetrable barrier to him. “I am nobody. I have never been an activist, nor a journalist, nor a fighter. I am simply an ordinary person who, from the start of the war, hoped that President Bashar al‑Assad would leave. But that did not matter to them. For all these years Assad and his friends, Russia and Iran, bombarded us and attacked us. They ruined our lives. But today we have returned home,” Salah adds, noting that his former residence no longer exists.
All of this happened in a matter of days. On Wednesday, Syrian rebels—led by Hayat Tahrir al‑Sham (HTS)—launched an offensive against the Damascus regime, drawing in allies from Tehran and Moscow, who had become preoccupied elsewhere. At first, HTS claimed the move was to recover territory lost in 2020 before the last ceasefire. Yet the rebels advanced, Assad’s troops retreated. Within three days, with little fighting, the opposition had seized almost the entire city of Aleppo, Syria’s second city and once the country’s economic heart before the war began.
Yet there was more: the flight of Assad’s soldiers was so pronounced that, by that Saturday night, the rebels controlled the whole city of Hama, located roughly 150 kilometers south of Aleppo and one of the early centers of the 2011 uprising.
Fear of the newcomers
“The first thing I noticed when we arrived in Aleppo was the fear in the people’s eyes,” explains Abdulfaki, a native of Aleppo and a noncombatant member of the opposition militias. “Many kept their distance, convinced we had come to kill them. Then they realized we were here only to free the city. They told us Assad and his allies had described us as barbarians, murderers. They lied, of course.”
Hayat Tahrir al‑Sham, the largest rebel faction pushing the assault on Damascus, controls the Idlib region and was once the Syria branch of al‑Qaeda. But in 2017, with the rise of its current leader, Abu Mohammad al‑Jolani, the group renounced jihadism and focused on fighting within Syria’s borders.
Al‑Jolani has lately appeared in public wearing a buttoned shirt typical of European style and a neatly trimmed beard, projecting himself as a leader who is deeply Islamic yet tolerant toward religious minorities. In Idlib, sharia law is in effect, but the image is that of a leader trying to be approachable rather than an unyielding foe.
“Eight years have passed and many of us believed the Syrian revolution was dead. Some of us even thought so. Yet we kept going. And the first thing that came to mind as Aleppo welcomed Friday night was the memories of childhood, the friends who died here under Assad’s bombs,” says Abdulfaki.
Falls and contrasts
In Aleppo, the past and the present collide. Eight years ago, when the regime finally took full control of the city, it did so after months of siege and bombardment by the Russian and Syrian air forces against tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the eastern districts. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that the battle of Aleppo, which ended in January 2016, claimed more than 30,000 lives, most of them civilians.
The contrast with the present, when the opposition briefly captured most of Aleppo with relatively few casualties, is striking. “The big difference is that we, the opposition, are the city’s inhabitants. I lived here most of my life,” says Salah, and like him, many militiamen and civilians in the rebel zones feel a shared bond with this place. The memory of the city’s destruction in 2016 still weighs heavily in the minds of residents who endured those years.
“The rebel militias, with their flaws and strengths, are made up of local people who grew up here. They love Aleppo. The city is in their blood. Assad and his regime, allied with Russia and Iran’s forces, did not care about Aleppo. They wrecked it in 2016 because their only aim was victory on the ground. The difference is clear: they wanted to crush the rebellion. We wanted to come home.”