Ghost town: Homs residents arrive to inspect their homes.

Ghost town: Homs residents arrive to inspect their homes. Photo: Reuters

Amman: Hundreds of Syrians streamed into the city they once called home on Friday to see for the first time the apocalyptic destruction wreaked on Homs during two years of siege.

Returning to their neighbourhood a day after the Syrian military regained control of their city, residents found a ghost town of destroyed buildings and the remnants of their old lives.

During three years of heavy fighting and suffocating blockades, the streets and homes in the "capital of the revolution", where people had rallied against the government in 2011, had been pulverised to rubble and dust.

Unable to succeed with a ground invasion for several years, government troops pummelled this rebel enclave with artillery and air power.

Civilians trapped inside the districts had cowered in basements hoping they would withstand the impacts of bombs. Doctors used rudimentary tools - operating with no electricity and unable to bring in medicines, to try to save the lives of the casualties that piled into the field hospitals. But still hundreds had died.

Under a deal struck this week, the government assumed control of these old quarters, allowing the remaining 2000 insurgents to leave for other rebel-held towns.

The final piece of the agreement fell into place yesterday afternoon as the last 300 or so rebels left Homs in green public buses.

Even before the last ones departed, government bulldozers were clearing paths through the heaviest rubble.

Talal Barazi, the governor of Homs, said engineering units were combing Hamidiyeh and other parts of the old quarters in search of mines and other explosives. State TV said two soldiers were killed while dismantling a bomb.

Troops discovered two field hospitals in the neighbourhoods of Bab Houd and Qarabis, as well as a network of underground tunnels linking the districts to each other and to the countryside.

Slowly, curious residents started to trickle back. By late afternoon, hundreds of men, women and children were walking around, some struggling with pushchairs over the potholed, stone-strewn streets. Many stopped to take pictures on their mobile telephones, wandering down paths carved out of rubble. Almost nothing was left of Old Homs; a strip of rubble and cavernous holes where the MiG planes struck. Facades had been blown away. Few of the buildings that still stood had all of their supporting walls. And in among the rubble was the debris of former lives: bedsheets, clothes, children's toys, a kitchen sink.

In the mostly Christian district of al-Hamidiyeh, Huda, 45 found nothing where her house once stood but a pile of rubble and a lone cup from her coffee service. She and her husband dug through the rubble. "I came to check on my house, but I couldn't find it. I didn't find a roof, I didn't find walls. I only found this coffee cup, which I will take with me as a souvenir," she said.

Resident after resident returned to find their home had met the same fate. One man walked out with a guitar under his arm. A woman emerged from her home carrying a stack of photograph albums. "I have nothing left for me to remember so I brought these photos," Fadia al-Ahmar said. "My house was destroyed."

In the Maljaa neighbourhood, every building was damaged, even cars parked inside. An eight-storey building was flattened into rubble. Shopfronts were pancaked. Walls of apartment blocks were blasted with holes from artillery shells.

For the Syrian government, the reclaiming of Homs is a major victory ahead of the presidential elections next month. But the destroyed streets are also a poignant testimony to the suffering endured by civilians in order for President Bashar al-Assad to "win" his civil war.

Telegraph, London