Traces of the revolution

"Dreams come true," reads the slogan—white paint on a soot-blackened wall, a belated triumph scrawled on the remains of a wall at the edge of Kafr Nabl. It recalls a time when freedom in Syria was still a distant vision, when the fear of torture and airstrikes hung over the country like a nightmare.

In Kafr Nabl, people are familiar with both—dreams and nightmares. That includes Ahmad al-Jalal, a 43-year-old dental technician who, in his former life, was an activist and cartoonist. From 2011, al-Jalal drew political posters for the Syrian revolution before fleeing the bombs of the Assad regime and Russia to the Turkish border.

On a Friday in late April 2025, he returned to his old hometown in southern Idlib province. The small city is largely destroyed, its streets desolate. Al-Jalal, now living in Azaz in the far north of the country, carries the air of a gentle, timeworn revolutionary—full beard and black leather jacket, dark curls combed back, a mixture of joy and sorrow in his eyes.

Kafr Nabl is a symbol of creative resistance

By this time, al-Jalal's first visit back to Kafr Nabl was already months behind him. On 8 December 2024, when Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow and Syria was finally free, al-Jalal returned to his hometown with a few friends. "It was very emotional," the former activist recalls. The joy of liberation was accompanied by shock at the scale of the destruction.

The loss of his comrades, who could not live to see this day, weighed heavily on al-Jalal. Three of them—prominent figures Raed Fares, Hamud al-Jneid and Khaled al-Issa—are immortalised in mosaic portraits on a cliff wall at the edge of the Kafr Nabl sports ground, a place where people had demonstrated for years, sending their messages out to the world.

At the start of the 2011 revolution, this provincial city saw the emergence of a unique, creative form of civilian resistance that Kafr Nabl has since come to symbolise. Before the war, few knew the small city of 50,000 in southern Idlib. But from spring 2011, a group of activists there began to attract attention.

With their English-language banners, sharp slogans and colourful, satirical cartoons, they became known worldwide. They called for no-fly zones, criticised then-US President Barack Obama for his hesitant support, explained to Western peace activists why they opposed the war but supported intervention, and after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, expressed solidarity with their "Ukrainian brothers."

"The revolution is an idea, and ideas do not die"

The small city soon became an icon of the uprising. On the ground, the driving force was Raed Fares, a former real estate agent who rose to become a leading figure of the revolution. In Syria's darkest hours, he coined the phrase: "The revolution is an idea, and ideas do not die." Like activists across the country, Fares and his peers faced brutal repression until local rebels drove out regime forces in 2013.

Kafr Nabl was considered "liberated". Years of self-organisation followed. Raed Fares ran the local media centre and, in 2013, founded Radio Fresh, one of Syria's first independent radio stations. He also set up the Union of Revolutionary Bureaus, a coalition of civil society initiatives.

There are still traces of this commitment to be found just steps from the sports ground: half-collapsed buildings that once housed Radio Fresh’s studio and the Union’s offices, remnants of walls with faded names now overgrown with weeds. The wall bearing the words "Dreams come true" still stands here, like a carefully curated memorial in the open-air museum of the Syrian revolution.

Civil work in those years required courage, for the activists faced two brutal, powerful enemies: on one side, the Assad regime, which hunted and bombed them; on the other, extremist militias that made their lives miserable, including the Islamist Nusra Front and the successor alliance Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by today's interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. It was a two-front war that many paid for with their lives—among them Raed Fares, Hamud al-Jneid and Khaled al-Issa.

The Islamists resented the liberal-democratic ideals of Radio Fresh, but their attempts to control the station failed. When they demanded women's voices be taken off the air, Fares and his colleagues distorted all voices so that it was impossible to tell the difference between genders. When music was banned, Radio Fresh temporarily filled the airwaves with animal sounds.

But the violence only escalated. In 2014, Fares narrowly survived an assassination attempt he attributed to the Islamic State (IS). Four years later, in November 2018, he wasn't as fortunate. Fares and his colleague al-Jneid were shot dead in their car by unknown assailants. The murder was never solved. Around the same time Ahmad al-Jalal, the group's cartoonist, received threats. He fled to Azaz, a town north of Aleppo in an area controlled not by HTS but by Turkish-backed militias. HTS was searching for him then, he says.

When the regime launched its last major offensive in 2019, with Russian and Iranian support, and recaptured the south of Idlib province, the remaining inhabitants fled north towards the Turkish border. Places like Kafr Nabl were reduced to rubble and ash and turned into military posts for Assad's soldiers and Iranian militiamen in the years that followed. The front line was only a few kilometres to the north and was laid with landmines.

Osman al-Sweid was among the last to leave Kafr Nabl at the end of 2019. "We still took care of the fig harvest, then we left," says the sturdily built father with a thick head of hair. It's a Friday in April, and he is visiting for the third time since fleeing.

At the square by the town's entrance, he meets friends, neighbours and old companions. They exchange news, consider what the future might hold, make plans. A small shop sells building materials—nails, screws, pipes, hoses, plastic sheeting. So far, only a few residents have returned, perhaps 200 families, al-Sweid estimates.

Kafr Nabl still feels like a ghost town. The streets are full of potholes, the buildings burned out and crumbling. After the bombardments, Assad's henchmen looted the city, al-Sweid says. "Doors, windows, pipes, sinks, tiles—everything they could turn into money, they took."

It is a familiar pattern. Every area the regime recaptured—whether around Damascus, in Daraa, Homs, Hama, Idlib or Aleppo—was not only bombarded with rockets and barrel bombs, but stripped bare. According to UN figures, one-third of Syria's housing units have been destroyed or severely damaged.

In its current state, Kafr Nabl is essentially uninhabitable. The Molham Volunteering Team, an NGO that has been organising humanitarian aid in north-western Syria for years, has estimated that repairing the infrastructure alone would cost 2.5 million dollars. The team runs schools and health centres and, following the earthquake in February 2023, built several residential complexes for widows and orphans.

Molham is currently assessing the level of destruction in different areas to facilitate the coordinated return of internally displaced people. The idea is straightforward: instead of rebuilding a little everywhere at once, the priority is to restore basic infrastructure area by area, so that residents of each town can leave the camps in the north and return home simultaneously.

Viele Gebiete sind noch immer vermint

So far, those making the journey back are people who have a house with a roof in their hometown and can afford the repairs. Everyone else, especially widows with children, remain in the camps, abandoned and forgotten by the world. Many aid organisations focus their efforts further inland to help those returning home, leaving insufficient resources to provide for those left behind.

Osman al-Sweid and his wife and children will remain in the camp in Barischa in the north of the province for the foreseeable future. He has just become a father for the sixth time. For the little ones, the situation in Kafr Nabl is still too dangerous, al-Sweid says. "The area is full of mines and unexploded ordnance, and no one knows exactly where they are," he explains. The problem is nationwide. Of the estimated over one million explosive devices used since 2011, experts believe up to thirty percent may not have detonated.

After 14 years of war, Syria is therefore among the most heavily contaminated countries in the world, yet support is limited. A few international NGOs, such as Handicap International and Halo Trust, are working on demining, but progress is slow. With hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people currently returning to their homes, experts expect casualty numbers to rise. In the first five months of this year alone, Doctors Without Borders recorded 470 incidents involving unexploded ordnance.

In Kafr Nabl, locals are trying to locate and neutralise mines and unexploded devices themselves, al-Sweid explains. Injuries and deaths occur frequently. "Recently, three children from the same family stepped on a mine and died," he says. The two brothers and their cousin had been tending sheep near Kafr Nabl in early March.

A terrible accident, one that Mohammed al-Mahruq, the volunteer head of the Nur al-Din Zenki Mosque, remembers well. He has just finished leading Friday prayers when I speak to him. Around three dozen men are coming out of the house of worship on the main square. Most of them, like Osman al-Sweid and Ahmad al-Jalal, are only visiting the town.

No one seems to mind the hole a rocket made in the roof of the prayer hall. Al-Mahruq wears a dark green djellaba, his grey hair and beard neatly trimmed. As a member of the local council, he was formerly part of Kafr Nabl’s self-administration.

Today, al-Mahruq welcomes every returnee but also understands those who hesitate. Those who own land can sell a portion to rebuild their homes, he says; others rely on support from family members working for an NGO or living abroad.

But for infrastructure—water, electricity, medical care and education—massive external assistance is needed. "If the schools reopened, forty percent of the displaced whose homes are damaged but repairable could return," al-Mahruq says.

Ahmad al-Jalal, the former activist and cartoonist, is not among them; his family home was almost completely destroyed. He will remain in Azaz for the foreseeable future, where he studied dental technology and now works at a friend’s practice. Some of his political posters have survived and were recently displayed in an exhibition in Damascus. Keeping the memory of the revolution alive is important to al-Jalal, even if, he says, there are more urgent matters in Syria than building memorials.

The activists from Kafr Nabl have come to terms with the new authorities. HTS has become more pragmatic in recent years, the ex-revolutionary says. Ahmed al-Sharaa now governs all of Syria; HTS has been dissolved, the US has removed the group from its terrorist list, and al-Sharaa has been rehabilitated. He speaks of including all segments of the population.

But the hatred and desire for revenge, widespread after 14 years of war and 54 years of dictatorship, are beyond his control. Assassinations and massacres continue, extremists commit atrocities and efforts to further divide society persist.

All the more urgent is the need to remember the goals of the Syrian revolution—a life of dignity and freedom, without fear and with equal rights for all. That dream has yet to be realised for many Syrians, and disappointment is widespread. The story of Raed Fares and his fellow activists could help keep hope for a "new Syria" alive—not least because it continues to live on amid the ruins at the town’s edge.

This is an edited translation of the German original. Translated by Max Graef Lakin.

This text will also appear shortly in a joint edition of Qantara and Kulturaustausch magazine. Find more stories, interviews and analyses in our Syria focus section.