Once a vital power hub for Damascus, Qaboun now lies in ruins. Among those returning is Mohamed Qusay, a former war journalist, walking through the wreckage of his hometown. With little support and only an hour of electricity every eight days, residents face an uphill battle to rebuild their lives.
“We will rebuild our homes and our lives. But first, we need to restore the electricity that Assad took from us. Because even if all that’s left is rubble, this is still our home.”
Mohamed Qusay, 27, known simply as Qusay in his city, walks through the wreckage of what was once his home. His brown eyes still shine, his face carries a quiet kindness. He avoids talking about the future. “In Syria, we live one day at a time.” The streets he once knew are now unrecognisable — crushed concrete, twisted metal, silence where life used to be.
For five years, Qaboun was besieged and bombed by Assad’s forces, under the pretext of protecting the Alawite neighbourhoods nearby. Sending videos was a daily struggle. Batteries were scarce, and to find an internet signal, they had to climb to the top of bombed-out buildings.
“It became our daily mission, but we always found a way,” Qusay tells The New Arab.
Before the war, Qaboun, just 7 km north of Damascus, was an essential artery for the capital supplying up to 60% of Greater Damascus’s electricity, equipped with three major power stations. One, built just a year before the war, housed multiple generators. Another is now a cemetery for fallen fighters.
Today only one power station remains partially functional — 90% of Qaboun’s low-voltage grid is gone.
In 2017, after a government-brokered agreement led to the evacuation of 2,000 rebel fighters to Idlib, Qusay, then 19, left with his parents and one sister. Three months later, he crossed into Turkey, taking whatever work he could — mechanic, delivery driver, anything to survive.
December 8, 2024, Bashar al-Assad falls. Qusay doesn’t hesitate, he’s going home. He recalls 50 other people displaced like him who came back to the district.
But returning to Qaboun was a brutal awakening. He wandered through the wreckage. “This was our office,” he says, standing over a pile of rubble. “Here, my friend died. Over there was my home.”
His house had been deliberately demolished after residents were forced out — officially for demining, but likely to prevent their return. Of the 30,000 pre-war inhabitants, only around 2,000 remain.
Like many, he struggles to find shelter and most returnees stay with relatives. A few homes are still standing, and those available — without more electricity than the one provided by the government — cost $200-$300 per month, an unaffordable price in a country where the average salary is just $50.
Syria’s interim government faces the overwhelming task of rebuilding a country in ruins. One of its most immediate challenges is the most basic: keeping the lights on.
“We only generate 1,500 megawatts — far from enough. So we ration electricity to just two hours a day,” said Omar Shaqrouq, Syria’s new electricity minister. His goal: to increase capacity to 12,000 megawatts within five years.
For years, Assad’s government struggled to maintain the energy sector under international sanctions. While some restrictions have been lifted, financial sanctions remain, making foreign investment nearly impossible.
“We’re waiting for sanctions to be lifted so we can import transformers and cables, or for donor countries to step in,” says Jalal Shekhani, the emergency office manager for energy in Qaboun.
With over 235,000 displaced Syrians returning since December 2024, electricity demand is surging. But Qaboun’s residents are doing what they always have: improvising.
A group of 50 locals, led by 50-year-old Ahmed Al Habboul, are patching up old cables, restoring power to homes that had been cut off.
“We need real support. What we’re doing is just makeshift fixes, and it’s not enough,” Ahmed admits. A functioning home needs 4,000 watts per day. Today, people are lucky if they get 1,000.
During the war, civilians taught themselves electrical work. “Where did we learn how to repair power lines? In Qaboun,” they reply. The Assad regime had cut power to opposition areas while keeping intelligence offices fully lit. Desperate to survive, residents rewired the city themselves, stealing light from the darkness.
“When Assad’s regime destroyed electricity infrastructure or cut power, it was not only about depriving people of light, but about using electricity as a weapon of war — undermining civilian resilience, crippling essential services, and enforcing siege tactics that pushed communities into submission through deprivation and exhaustion,” explains Benjamin Fève, a senior analyst in Arabic Policy and Economics.
Even now, some take matters into their own hands. A small house, miraculously intact amid the destruction, belongs to an elderly couple. Qusay calls them “pirates.” They have 12 hours of electricity per day — far more than their neighbours —because they secretly connected their home to the old intelligence bureau’s power supply, which had electricity 24/7 under Assad.
At night, Qaboun falls into darkness. Rania Leila, a 38-year-old mother of three, lights two candles and sets up a battery-powered lamp as winter cold seeps through the walls.
“You quickly feel like you’re living in a tent without electricity,” she says, pulling blankets around her children.
A barber charges his clippers with a diesel generator. “In Qaboun, we know how to do everything.”
Local authorities worry these makeshift repairs are making things worse. “Residents fix cables on their own without notifying the emergency office, leading to frequent power failures,” says Shekhani.
“Electricity is Qaboun’s lifeline – without it even water pumps can’t function. The fuel shortage worsens the crisis, forcing people to rely on electricity for heating, which overloads transformers.”
In order to restore the network, another challenge remains: the rubble. “The ruins must be cleared in order to repair all the electricity system,” Shekhani adds.
For now, Qusay stays with his sister and her five children in Damascus, still searching for a home of his own. He refuses to rent in Qaboun. “The ones with intact houses are those who worked for Assad or stayed silent. That makes our return even harder.”
His friend, Omar Al-Halbouni, 29, also returned from Turkey to Qaboun. “Electricity brings life. In Turkey, we had good living conditions. Here, even taking a shower, waiting for water to warm up — or taking it cold — it’s a daily struggle. We’re used to hardship, but we need our dignity back.”
Qusay looks at his ruined city and remains unwavering. “I always knew I’d come back. But staying that’s the real battle.”
Paloma de Dinechin is a French freelance investigative journalist, currently writing from Syria. Her articles have been published in Le Monde, Liberation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Expresso, Die Zeit, and others. She was awarded in the category outstanding investigative reporting by Fetisov Journalism Awards in 2021 for an investigation into the murdered Mexican journalist Regina Martinez
Follow her on Instagram: @palogram
