The Batash family are working with their bare hands to clear debris from Aleppo's al-Mouassassi Street, rebuilding their wrecked neighborhood after years of fighting that came to an end in December.
Heyam Batash, 56, has sores on her fingers from scrubbing clothes in freezing water, her sons Ayad and Youssef forage firewood from wrecked houses and her grandchildren fetch bread from a charity-run bakery nearby.
"We hope life can get back to what it was before," said Heyam, wearing a purple dress and black headscarf.
Syria's civil war has not only unleashed carnage across the country but shredded its social fabric, dividing those who backed different sides, scattering families and communities, and ruining millions of lives.
The Batash family is not politically active. But they said the army careers of several of their men made them lean towards the government. One of their cousins joined the rebels, which caused bitter conflict.
Their story shows how ordinary Syrians have suffered at the hands of both sides in the war, driven from their homes and forced to endure looting, bombardment, death, disappearance and separation from loved ones.
Living in bitter cold, without electricity or running water and using paraffin lamps for light, the Batash family are among the tens of thousands of Aleppans returning to the rubble of their neighborhoods rather than fleeing as refugees.
Aleppo, Syria's most populous city before the war, was split into government and rebel zones until the army retook the insurgent-held east, where al-Mouassassi Street is located, in battles that devastated whole neighborhoods.
When the defeated rebels departed, tens of thousands of residents of east Aleppo chose to leave too, fearing reprisals by President Bashar al-Assad's army.
But tens of thousands of others remained in their war-damaged homes and have been joined by people who had fled rebel areas to seek shelter with the government in western Aleppo.
REUTERS
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