It was a warm Saturday morning in October, the last day of the weekend in Syria, and Samir Saeed had been at work since 8 AM. The 56-year-old stonemason picked his way through the rubble of an alley in Aleppo’s ancient souk, destroyed first by war and then by a 2023 earthquake. The souk is the largest medieval marketplace in the Middle East, with some 13 kilometres of narrow, winding alleys. Parts of it are close to the base of the city’s imposing thirteenth-century citadel, where I was waiting to meet Saeed. The fortress’s limestone walls and sloping stone bridge crown Aleppo’s highest point, dominating the skyline. The entire Old City, parts of which date back to the Bronze Age, is a World Heritage site. In recent years, it became a battleground.

The sons of Syria ravaged this historic trading hub in the early years of a 2011 uprising that spiralled into a 13-year war. In 2012, rebel forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad entered the city, which became the site of pitched battles between insurgents and Syrian army soldiers. The souk’s labyrinth of covered passageways echoed with shelling and gunfire as rebel groups took up positions in shopfronts that had been passed down through generations. In September 2012, a fire swept through the maze, reducing hundreds of shops to blackened shells. Explosions brought down elegant vaulted ceilings, leaving stretches of the once-enclosed alleyways exposed to the sky. By the time Assad’s forces retook the divided city in 2016, the bustle of the once-vibrant souk was replaced with silence, debris and the enduring scars of war.

Today, the sons of Aleppo are repairing their souk, with the support of the Aga Khan Foundation, which has been working there since 2018. More than half a dozen sections have been fully restored, allowing almost 300 shops to reopen. In those parts, crowds of shoppers once again walk along stone floors worn smooth by centuries of footsteps to the sound of merchants trumpeting their wares. But in other parts of the souk, it still looks like the war ended yesterday.

Saeed led me through one of those sections, past neatly stacked piles of salvaged stones. Cherub-faced and clean-shaven, and already coated in fine white dust, he pointed to the ruin of a shop that once sold galabiyas, and another that specialised in prayer beads. “You could barely move here, it was so crowded,” he said. Now there was nobody else around. It was silent, except for birdsong and the crunching of debris underfoot. “It burns my heart,” Saeed said as we walked past walls blackened by fire and shelling, their stones pocked with bullet and shrapnel marks. “It’s as if they were competing to see who could cause more damage.”

We reached a covered part of the souk where about two dozen of Saeed’s colleagues were at work. An electricity generator hummed. Men perched on scaffolding cleaned the masonry of the arched ceiling, dislodging dust that rained down onto workers ferrying stones back and forth.

Saeed, a third-generation stonemason, approached his work with a solemnity befitting its historic significance. He knelt at the base of an ancient pillar that was being restored with matching limestone. After wetting a slab, he scored it with a comb-headed hammer, blending new with old. The rhythmic clink, he said, was a conversation with walls whose “builders’ bones have turned to powder”. The old stones have a soul, he said. “I sing to them. We understand each other.” The souk, he insisted, “will return, with God’s permission. It must be restored exactly as it was.”

These craftsmen, like other Aleppans, are trying to repair what the war destroyed. The city, Syria’s largest by pre-war population, was once its industrial and manufacturing heart, contributing about a third of the country’s GDP. During the conflict, it became emblematic of a fractured nation, divided between a rebel-held east and a government-controlled west.

Aleppo is no longer in the headlines. The guns have fallen silent, and global attention has moved elsewhere. Yet the city – and the country – are engaged in what may be a harder battle: not simply reconstructing buildings, but remaking the relationships that once allowed those buildings to function as a shared space. The question now is how Syrians who lived on opposite sides of the frontlines – who lost homes, relatives and illusions – can inhabit a common civic life, and learn to trust each other, and trust the new authorities.

In the market, restoration follows a clear plan: to rebuild what was. Beyond it, the blueprint for Syria’s communal repair is less concrete.

More than a year after Assad fled, the country remains carved into zones of foreign influence. In the north-west, not far from Aleppo, Turkey holds sway in Idlib Province – once the rebels’ seat of power – and continues to provide electricity, internet and cellphone coverage to the area. Turkish military outposts dot the landscape, particularly along key highways.

Until recently, US troops and their armed Kurdish allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces controlled the oil-rich north-east. In January 2026, government forces advanced on this territory, seizing most key oil and gas fields and burying the SDF’s dream of administering a Kurdish enclave it called Rojava. Russia, where Assad is exiled, maintains its only naval foothold along the Mediterranean in the Alawite heartland of Latakia and Tartus, a presence it is renegotiating with Damascus’ new leadership.

Over the past 18 months, Israel has seized more Syrian territory, adding to what it occupied under the Assads, and crippled the country’s military in a series of airstrikes. In March, Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations urged the body to “put an end” to Israeli “aggressions” in southern Syria, where the Israeli military mans checkpoints, conducts raids, and is shelling and kidnapping citizens. Israel has also bombed the Ministry of Defence and the area around the presidential palace in Damascus, and continues to deepen its foothold. It demands a demilitarised zone stretching from the Israeli border to Damascus, ostensibly to protect Syrian Druze from a repeat of violence by government-affiliated forces last year. (Some Druze welcome Israel’s support, but others reject it.)

Syria under Assad was the linchpin state in Shiite Iran’s “axis of resistance”. Now, under Ahmad al-Sharaa, the founder of Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch and the country’s new president, it has moved into Riyadh’s Sunni, pro-American orbit. The Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, are shepherding Syria’s reintegration onto the global diplomatic stage while eyeing and inking vast investment opportunities.

In a country redefining its national symbols, holidays, historic heroes and school curriculum, what it even means to be Syrian is an open question. Talk of federalism, decentralisation and partition has divided public opinion. During the conflict, a generation grew up viewing each other as ‘the other’. An address came to define a perceived political allegiance – no matter that millions of Syrians simply wanted to survive in their homes, instead of packing their lives into whatever they could carry. People in rebel-held areas were demonised as ‘terrorists’ by government loyalists, while those under Assad’s governance were smeared as ‘shabiha’, or regime thugs. The name-calling served a purpose: it’s harder to kill somebody you can identify with.

It was once considered rude to ask a Syrian their sect or ethnic identity – this is a country home to Kurds, various Christian and Muslim denominations, Druze, Alawites, Turkmen, Yazidis, Ismailis and others – but sectarianism has taken root more deeply. When the revolution began, it was not a Sunni uprising against an Alawite president. But it became increasingly sectarian as minorities grew fearful of the growing Sunni Islamist rhetoric of much of the opposition, and clung to a regime that claimed it would protect them. Still, the war remained largely political: Sunnis on opposite sides of the political divide killed each other. So did members of other sects. Most of Assad’s conscript army was Sunni, because most Syrians are Sunni. There were also many Sunnis who supported the regime or were part of it, including in its uppermost echelons. 

Sharaa, who has merged former rebel brigades into a nominal national army, seems to be keeping a fragile lid on intra-rebel rivalries that plagued the war years from boiling over. Still, it is unclear how firmly he controls the country’s many armed men, and whether hardline Islamists can genuinely moderate an ideology that is not merely a political orientation, but an identity and a lifestyle. Recently, the local administration in Latakia banned female public-sector employees from wearing makeup at work; in Damascus, restaurants can no longer serve alcohol and liquor stores have been outlawed, except in majority-Christian neighbourhoods, sparking protests. Such rulings have renewed fears that the new socially conservative authorities will intrude on personal freedoms.The government has promised to bring Assad and his worst henchmen to justice, though it has made no such promise about commanders of rebel factions who terrorised Syrians during the war. It has also granted amnesty to members of the former security services whom it deems not to have been involved in the bloodletting. The absence of transitional justice – itself a measure of the enormity of the task, and the trauma of a conflict that left hundreds of thousands of people dead or disappeared – has spurred some to take matters into their own hands. Vigilante justice and revenge killings, mainly of minorities and alleged regime loyalists, continue across Syria.

In March 2025, forces aligned with the government massacred Alawites in the governorates of Latakia and Tartus, and a similar fate befell the Druze in Sweida not long after that. Videos of Alawite men forced to crawl and bark like dogs, and of elderly Druze sheikhs being humiliated to the glee of their tormentors went viral. In one clip, an Alawite woman standing near the bodies of her two sons is taunted. “We will stomp on every Alawite,” a fighter tells her. “You are traitors.” In another snippet, an elderly man is asked what sect he belongs to. “What do you mean you are Syrian? Are you Muslim or Druze?” the fighter asks. The man is shot dead for replying “Druze”.

The violence in the Alawite heartland exploded after armed remnants – or so-called felool – of the Assad regime ambushed and killed more than 200 security forces, according to the state’s account. Thousands of government-aligned fighters from across the country descended on the coast. A government commission confirmed that more than 1,400 people were killed over several days and identified 298 suspects it blamed for individual acts of revenge. The full report was not made public, although trials have begun for a handful of security personnel suspected of abuses, as well as some alleged felool. Human Rights Watch has lamented the government’s lack of transparency regarding “whether its investigation has examined the role of senior military or civilian leaders, or what steps it will take to hold those with command authority to account”.

In Sweida, security forces were mobilised after 1,760 people were killed and more than 2,100 were wounded in clashes between Druze and Sunni Bedouin tribesmen. The violence was triggered by a dispute between a Bedouin tribesman and a Druze trader, which led to the trader’s abduction and the retaliatory kidnappings of Bedouins. A government commission acknowledged that “serious human rights violations” occurred, but said any transgressions by government forces were “individual, not systematic”.

Many of Sharaa’s supporters – including activists who once documented Assad’s wrongdoings – downplayed or excused the sectarian killings. They have insisted that the government-aligned forces acted in self-defence. Some have also justified Sharaa’s appointment of his relatives, including his brothers, to key government positions. Assad notoriously did the same: his followers were dubbed ‘minhibakjis’, or ‘we love you’s’, for seeing no fault in their leader. Some old habits, it appears, die hard.

A sense of Sunni Arab triumphalism – that it is “our time”, as a friend and former rebel commander from Idlib put it to me – is palpable. It manifests in the large number of Idlibis occupying senior government positions across the country, and in the swagger that accompanies markers such as an Idlibi car number plate. Once a neglected backwater, Idlib has become the new Qardaha – the hometown of the Assads – inspiring the same fear, caution and deference. In private conversations in Damascus and Aleppo, the cosmopolitan cultural and mercantile heartlands, people complain about the perceived country bumpkins now running the state, and about how “revolutionary activities” factor favourably in job applications.

The Syrian conflict was – and its aftermath remains – as much a class divide between the urbane elite and the poorer hinterlands as it was about ideology, politics and freedom. Other divides persist, too: between returning exiles and those who remained in the country, and between formerly regime- and rebel-held villages, and within towns and cities, including Aleppo, that are trying to heal.

Some of Syria’s most consequential negotiations are taking place in lounge rooms, government offices and neighbourhoods still divided by memory. At the heart of these conversations lie urgent, unresolved questions: can citizens trust that justice and accountability will be delivered for wartime crimes and peacetime abuses? Can they rely on authorities to articulate a clear vision and competently guide the country’s economic recovery? Will citizenship be upheld as equal for all, regardless of ethnic or sectarian identity? Could personal freedoms and social practices be curtailed? Can the state be trusted to protect all its people? And how will neighbours become neighbours again after so much blood has been spilled?

These questions resonate in a context where state authority, though gradually strengthening, remains uneven, and in some areas contested. While rebel militias have been consolidated into a new national army, discipline and effective command and control remain uncertain. Sectarian distrust continues to undermine prospects for reconciliation. Fears about the ultraconservative Islamist pasts of Syria’s leaders also persist, and are not limited to minorities – progressive Sunnis share them, too.

Meanwhile, the compounded effects of economic collapse, war, US sanctions and mass displacement limit the state’s ability to deliver tangible improvements in daily life. Syria’s physical, social and institutional building blocks are being reassembled. It’s a formidable task. Rehabilitating society is harder than repairing stone.

In Aleppo, there are signs that the new authorities are working to manufacture this trust, a task they deem a priority. Last autumn, I spoke to Abdel-Wahab Daas, an earnest, harried 42-year-old lawyer in the government’s Political Affairs department, which has been organising meetings with representatives of various groups, including religious communities, professional and business associations and universities. We met in his second-floor office in the former city headquarters of Assad’s now-dissolved Ba‘ath Party, located opposite the public park. Daas described his bureau, which falls under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as “a bridge between the authorities and the people”, focused on fostering dialogue between Aleppo’s various communities while preventing the reemergence of “political felool”. (There are branches in other Syrian cities, too.)

The office monitors the activities of suspected regime loyalists and informs the security services if they are perceived to be threats. I asked Daas what would constitute a threat. An example, he said, would be if one of “Assad’s criminals”, as he put it, worked “to destroy the political infrastructure of the country”. He acknowledged that some people had ties to the regime “by necessity, for cultural, trade or business reasons”. He said he wasn’t worried about them. “Our interest is politicians who justified the regime’s crimes. These people are threats to society because they were tools of the criminal regime. They must remain under the government’s watch.” He wouldn’t say if they had identified any, or if any names had been passed to the security services.

In addition to direct mediation and community discussion groups, his office has organised university art exhibits, reforestation initiatives involving scout groups from various religious communities, and clean-up campaigns. “There are social troubles, big troubles, even within the same family or sect,” Daas said. “There are Sunni families that have members who were with the regime, and others who were with the opposition, and they have now returned to the city. Our role as authorities is to explore all the tools of communal reconciliation to bring them together.”

The previous day, Daas had invited members of the Christian community he identified as “notable representatives” to a meeting with government officials on the sixth and top floor of the former Ba‘ath Party headquarters. As the guests streamed in, they whispered among themselves, unsure what they’d been invited to. A building that once inspired fear was now hosting dialogue. More than 50 chairs were arranged in a semicircle, but not all were filled. At the front sat four speakers, including, most prominently, Abdul Rahman Salama, a deputy governor of Aleppo and the city’s wartime Al-Qaeda emir. (After the SDF was routed in the east, Salama was appointed as the governor of Raqqa, ISIS’s former de facto capital.)

A balding, bearded man, Salama was dressed in a sharp navy suit, white shirt and matching blue-and-white tie. He shook hands with some male – and female – guests in the audience before opening proceedings. “This is my first meeting of this type,” he said. “You are our family. There is no need for formalities. We would like to hear about what you are seeing. For certain, you must have lots of questions.” He continued: “Today, Syria needs to be built by its people, but the new government can’t do it alone – the financial burden is enormous.”

The meeting was both a fundraising appeal and a relationship-building exercise. Across Syria, local administrations were running grassroots campaigns, supported by civic groups, to fund the rehabilitation of public infrastructure. Salama said 355,000 homes in Aleppo had been destroyed during the war – a figure he said was twice as large as in the rest of the country combined. (The World Bank estimates that Syria’s rebuilding costs will exceed $200 billion.) Months later, in December, the city raised $426 million in a three-day donation drive. “One of our aims is to restore the national spirit,” Salama said. “The national spirit that united us for thousands of years must return.”

Another speaker, the Aleppan actor, television director and political activist Homam Hout, said the war had divided the city into three communities: 10% were revolutionaries, 10% were shabiha, and the rest, the vast majority, were caught between them, a category in which he placed Aleppo’s Christians. Their numbers, he claimed, had steadily declined since 2011, and now stood between 25,000 and 35,000 – down from the hundreds of thousands who once lived there. He fondly remembered learning theatre from the nuns who ran his school, and being one of just four Muslim students in a class of 30. “We don’t want Christians to emigrate, we want Christians outside Syria to return,” Hout said. “We are now trying to heal our wounds. People, we must build the state – you must build the state. Why are you distant from us? Because the men have beards? Because they are Muslim? Because they will outlaw alcohol, they will kill us? What more security can we offer? We have opened our hands, the presidential palace, and our hearts to you.”

Over the next one and three-quarter hours, the Christians – a mix of judges, lawyers, school principals, teachers, professors, pharmacists and others professionals (but no clerics) – cautiously raised a set of concerns: the need for swift justice amid lingering insecurity, genuine rather than symbolic Christian representation in government (there is one female federal minister) and the restoration of basic services. They questioned why former civil servants had been dismissed when not all were corrupt or loyal to Assad. (Sharaa has asked that many be reinstated.)

Salama took notes diligently, recalling people’s names and professions. But he riled the judges and lawyers in the room when he claimed that the Assad regime’s own statistics showed that 98% of the judiciary was corrupt. A judge in the audience named Hala retorted: “Who forced judges to pass certain rulings? Could a judge ignore a minister’s orders? You must differentiate – you can’t generalise.”

A lawyer named Rasha asked why there were no music festivals or theatre performances in the city, and why some newspapers had been closed. “Why has culture stopped?” she said. A government official responded that Aleppo’s citadel would soon host cultural events. “Everything you’ve raised is being discussed – it’s on the table,” Salama said. “I’m only asking you for time. Just wait and see what Syria will become. Please, be optimistic.”

In addition to community outreach, the state has also supported tribal and local conciliation councils to foster civil peace, although Daas said these were temporary measures while the judiciary was being revamped. “We don’t want to go backwards, to councils with sheikhs,” he said. “We want a state and its institutions.”

Conciliation councils were initially set up in 2017, soon after rebels established Idlib’s first civilian administration in the province. After Assad’s fall, these bodies spread across the country. Nominally independent but operating under the government’s auspices, they mediate criminal, financial, property and personal disputes, and aim to reach amicable settlements that are more socially than legally binding. Dissatisfied parties can still take their case to the courts. The mediating team usually included a lawyer, a Sharia judge, a tribal urf or expert in customary law, and specialists as needed.

The conciliation council in Furqan, a middle-class residential neighbourhood of Aleppo, is run by grey-haired Sheikh Shaaban al Dashir and his younger colleague Anas Afar, both of whom volunteer their services. The two men divide their days between running the council and serving in the army’s 62nd Division, a unit largely composed of fighters from the Turkish-backed former rebel group known as the Suleiman Shah Division. Inside the office, black leather couches and armchairs lined the walls. A row of coffee tables cut across the room, facing a wide desk flanked by two flags: Syria’s national flag and another bearing the Islamic shahada.

Afar told me he worked with the council because he feared Syria could slide back into conflict. “A problem between two people can become a problem between families that can become a problem between tribes, areas or sects. We are trying to resolve things before they get bigger,” he said. “This is the hardest period. The rebuilding period is always harder. The other side called us terrorists and we called them shabiha. How to rebuild relations? This is what we are struggling with.” 

The 38-year-old’s path was a familiar one: he was a protester turned rebel, who fought battles in his eastern Aleppo neighbourhood until he was forced to evacuate to Idlib in 2016, after Assad’s forces retook the city’s rebel strongholds. When he returned in 2024, the first thing he did was assure relatives who remained under regime control that they were safe from revenge attacks. Then he went to see his home, or what remained of it.

Both men said that a central pillar of their work involved convincing “revolutionaries who have deep wounds – their blood is boiling,” as Dashir put it, to suppress thoughts of revenge in favour of building a state. “I had to convince myself first,” Afar said. “When I came home, I was upset and angry that I had been displaced, that we’d been oppressed and our home destroyed, but by an act of God, revenge left my heart,” he said. “For almost a year now we have had weekly meetings with our guys. We tell them: Syria won’t be rebuilt if we engage in a cycle of revenge killings. Is your personal issue more important than Syria?”

Although their former battalion is accused of human rights abuses against minorities – its leaders are sanctioned by the US and Europe – both Dashir and Afar said that now, after the war, they had no problems with Kurds, or with Christians or most Druze, except the small Israeli-supported faction. They acknowledged that many Alawites had no ties to the regime, but when I asked about reports of massacres in the Alawite coastal heartland, an operation their army division took part in, Dashir dismissed the allegations as lies.

“I am telling you they attacked us, we defended ourselves,” he said. “They are not trustworthy. We are trying to build a state, but they want dominance. These people are fighting because they want power, to retain it. Let them stand in future elections, and if one of them wins, they can participate in governance.”

“The Alawites killed each other, believe me they did,” Dashir added.

I asked him if the elderly woman standing over her dead sons had killed them.

“For somebody to kill her sons?” he said. “I don’t think it happened. They attacked and killed our patrols. I swear, we only acted in self-defence.”

The new Syrian state is asserting itself after years of fragmentation. But on the other side of Aleppo’s former frontlines, for some, the same exercise of authority elicits suspicion and fear rather than stability. When I visited Sheikh Maqsoud, a predominantly Kurdish working-class neighbourhood, in late October, it was still under SDF control and the mood remained tense. (The SDF does not speak for all Kurds and is not solely a Kurdish force; it and has been accused of authoritarian practices including repressing political dissent and detaining adversaries.) A few weeks earlier, clashes had erupted between the SDF and Syrian state forces over the control of checkpoints, repression and arrests of protestors, reflecting deeper tensions over authority.

I was there to see Fahima Hamou, a female fighter turned coordinator of Kongra Star, a democratic women’s empowerment association. Hamou, who is in her 40s, smoked behind a desk decorated with a portrait of Kurdistan Workers’ Party founder Abdullah Öcalan. A Kurd from Afrin, she grew up in Achrafieh, an adjacent predominantly Kurdish working-class neighbourhood, at a time when, under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden to speak their language or mark holidays such as Nowruz. They did both clandestinely, she said, which made her feel like she had two identities: one public, the other private.

The revolution, Hamou said, made her feel like “a bird released from a cage. I felt that we must succeed.” For her, success meant being able to acknowledge her Sunni Kurdish identity by living her culture and speaking her language. As the revolution morphed into war, she joined an all-women’s battalion and soon learned who her enemies were: “There was the Syrian army and the (rebel) Free Army, and both were threats to us.” Her unit conducted evening patrols in the neighbourhood and set up checkpoints. “We paid with many martyrs,” she said. She switched to non-military work, helping distribute aid and finding accommodation for internally displaced people.

When I asked how she felt now that the revolution was over, she shook her head. It isn’t over, she said: “On the contrary. We finished one phase, another has begun.” The transitional government’s “mentality is no different from the previous regime in a way”, she said. “There is still extremism, a mindset that is against minorities, and especially against women.” Most disappointing, she said, was the government’s 2025 Constitutional Declaration of the Syrian Arab Republic, which use the word “Arab”, and identified Islamic jurisprudence is the principal source of legislation. “They see one ethnicity, one colour, one flag, one language, but Syria is multidimensional,” she said. “My two identities haven’t merged. Only when my national ID card says ‘The Syrian Republic’ will I be able to say that my identity reflects the new Syria.” She wanted a democratic, decentralised governance system and feared the SDF’s disarmament. “Is Syria stable and secure enough that I can let go of my weapons?” she asked.

In January, after short but intense clashes, the Syrian government pushed the SDF out of Sheikh Maqsoud and Achrafieh. Hamou took part in the fighting, and eventually fled with her comrades. A landmark ceasefire deal inked that month outlined the phased, negotiated integration of the city’s Kurdish-led military and civilian structures into Syrian state institutions, an arrangement to be replicated across the SDF’s former stronghold in the north-east. A historic presidential decree also recognised Kurdish as a national language, allowing it to be taught in schools; it restored citizenship to Kurdish Syrians stripped of their nationality in the 1960s; and declared Nowruz a national holiday. For the first time, Kurdish-language books were also featured at the Damascus Book Fair. In recent weeks the government has also pledged to decentralise and transfer some service provision and administrative powers from Damascus to provincial authorities. The measures are all key SDF demands, and have been welcomed by the group’s leadership.

Yet Hamou remains bitter about leaving Aleppo, and distrustful of the government, despite its recent historic outreach to Kurds. When I reached her by phone at an undisclosed location, she acknowledged the changes as “good first steps”, but said they were not enough. “We want a formal constitutional guarantee to protect Kurdish rights to our language and customs,” she said. Her distrust was precautionary. Rights granted by decree could be rescinded by decree. Weapons surrendered could not be reclaimed. By integrating SDF fighters individually into state agencies, rather than maintaining them as a unit, the state had effectively dissolved its power. “After the massacres on the coast and Sweida, and after Sheikh Maqsoud, how can I trust this government or any authority that says the guarantor of these measures is the Syrian government?” Hamou said. “How can I trust that? Tell me, how?”

Perhaps nowhere is that distrust felt more acutely than along the coast. There are no traditionally Alawite neighbourhoods in Aleppo. To learn about the concerns of some in that community, I travelled to Latakia, where I met an academic and researcher who has been quietly documenting abuses, including kidnappings and extrajudicial killings, and passing verified information to human rights groups abroad. He was afraid to be named and nervous about meeting, agreeing only after a mutual Alawite friend vouched for me. He chose a cafe on a busy commercial strip and made sure to avoid sitting near security cameras.

His phone beeped repeatedly during our conversation. He admitted that he had argued with his wife about coming to meet me. She called after he didn’t reply, warning him not to get into a car with me or accept a ride home. “I am very careful with my movements,” he said apologetically. “My movements are very limited. I move very, very, very carefully.”

A father of two in his 40s, he said he spent 217 days in the former regime’s notorious Sednaya prison in 2017, and another 164 days in another detention centre in 2023, both times for social media posts critical of the authorities. Assad’s security forces accused him of harming “the prestige of the state”. He has also been interrogated several times by the new authorities for criticising some of their policies, although, he noted, his new interrogator “is very polite”. He was dismissed from his university post early in the transition, one of some 12,000 state employees purged from Latakia province alone. After 52 of his students were killed in the March coastal massacres, he began investigating alleged violations in his area.

There have been reports of the abduction of Alawite children and women, including 38 last July – a case that was flagged by UN experts. The researcher had contributed to documenting six cases for another report by the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on Syria. He said that one of his cousins had narrowly escaped an abduction. So too had a child in his village.

In November, the Ministry of Interior released the results of its probe into the alleged kidnapping of 42 Alawite women and girls across four governorates. It concluded that only one was a genuine kidnapping – security forces had rescued the victim – and that most of the other victims had eloped, were engaged in prostitution or extortion, or had fled domestic violence.

The academic said the government was downplaying the danger. At the same time, he lamented that some in his community were exaggerating claims of kidnappings, and in so doing undermining real victims. “We have instigators within our own community,” he said – people exacerbating fears while trying to present themselves as saviours.

The researcher felt unsafe in a nation that he said wasn’t interested in protecting him. Along with some in his community, he is advocating for a decentralised administrative system “so that we are 100% tied to the state, but administer our own affairs”. Few in Latakia, he added, trusted the conciliation councils to defend their rights – even the Alawite council members, he said, who were considered traitors by some for serving as intermediaries for a “person many consider an enemy: Jolani”, using President Sharaa’s former jihadist nom de guerre.

As a secular Alawite, his greatest concern was a deepening schism between Sunnis and Alawites – and being forced to “defend and retreat” into his narrow sectarian identity amid the scapegoating of his community for Assad’s crimes. When I asked if he feared a return to the discriminated underdog status that Alawites suffered before the Assads came to power, he sighed. “I wish we could return to that period,” he said. “We were marginalised then. Now it’s as if we don’t exist, as if we are not citizens. We are all felool, that’s how they view us. Bashar al-Assad said they will kill you, and the truth is, they did. He was right.”

Across Syria, the challenge of communal cohesion is haunted by years of violence, displacement and contested authority. Recognition of rights, gestures of outreach, and decrees from the state are filtered through personal fears and memory – as well as hope. Rebuilding society is both a top-down and bottom-up effort: it requires government policy as well as the everyday work of restoring trust on the streets. Persistent local acts of cooperation and engagement are signals of progress, even as communities such as the Alawites in Latakia remain watchful, aware that the threat of violence remains.

For many Kurds, recent recognition of language and cultural rights has brought hope, but also concerns about the permanence of such measures, while the Druze have been divided by a foreign hand. President Sharaa has acknowledged and sought to alleviate such fears. “There is not a house in Syria that was not harmed by the previous regime,” he told a Kurdish delegation invited to the palace to mark Eid al-Fitr and Nowruz in late March. “Now it’s time for us to turn the page on the past and build Syria together.” In Aleppo, these efforts are lived and tested in streets and homes, in the attempts of ordinary people to survive and rebuild – like Saeed, the stonemason.

Before leaving Aleppo, I returned to see Saeed at his home in the Salaheddine neighbourhood. It was one of the first areas of the metropolis to fall to Assad’s opponents in the summer of 2012, although Saeed’s family lived on the regime side. The eastern, formerly rebel-held sector remains a wasteland of rubble, while Saeed’s area is crowded, working-class and bustling with small businesses.

Over lunch, Saeed recounted the displacement, destruction, fears and hopes his family of eight had endured in recent years, and how he hoped it was all behind them. “We lived a life of fear,” he said. “I’d go to work not knowing if I would return home, or if I’d find my family alive.”

He said his neighbours had fled as the conflict intensified. Saeed’s family soon realised that they were the only ones left in the building. Unable to afford rent, Saeed called a friend in Khan al-Asal, a village about 10 kilometres away, who offered them the use of his farmhouse. The family stayed in Khan al-Asal for several months until a chemical attack in March 2013 – one of the first times the banned weapons were used in the war – killed 25 people. Both the rebels and the regime blamed each other for the attack. (The UN investigated, but did not attribute responsibility for the incident.)

When Saeed returned to Salaheddine, he found his home destroyed. The family then lived in an abandoned second-floor apartment near the frontline with blown-out doors and windows, paying “a symbolic rent”. As elsewhere in Aleppo, a sheet strung across an alleyway formed a fabric dividing line between the regime soldiers near his apartment and the rebels on the other side. It also blocked the view of snipers. “We would all sleep in the same room,” Saeed said, “so that if we died, we died together.”

Saeed’s family now lives in a fourth-floor rental five minutes’ walk from where his apartment once stood. He took me to see what remained of his former home. There is little to indicate that the building was once six storeys high; the floors hadn’t pancaked. Instead, the concrete appears crumbled like cottage cheese. Adjacent piles of rubble mark where several other buildings once stood, alongside a new five-storey construction rising from the debris.

Saeed rued that his old building could not be rebuilt because he did not know where his neighbours were. Some had died; others had emigrated or changed their phone numbers. “It is not mine alone,” he said. The sting of being a stonemason unable to rebuild his own home was not lost on him. “Even if I had the money, I can’t decide to start rebuilding alone, and I can’t afford to rebuild the [three] floors below me. There is no consensus.”

His problem was technical only at first glance. A building with multiple owners cannot rise without agreement. Neither can a country. “If I remove a stone from the middle, the wall will collapse. We must rebuild from the bottom up – slowly, slowly – one stone at a time. Step by step, and the rest is on God,” he said. “We must gather and use all the stones to rebuild, otherwise it won’t work.”