“Al-‘ard haafya. La terra è nuda [the land is bare].” Abdu concluded one of our discussions with this sentence in the languages we share, Arabic and, more recently, Italian. The bare land is the landscape returnees from Lebanon, northern Syria, Turkey, and other countries encounter as they set foot in the city of al-Qusayr and its surrounding rif [countryside]. Nestled between Homs and the Syria-Lebanon border, Al-Qusayr was the military theatre of the ruthless counterinsurgency campaign led by Hezbollah and the regime forces against the rebel factions controlling, at that time, most of the region. Culminated in the Battle of al-Qusayr in the spring of 2013 and the expulsion of the local population, the Battle became the blueprint for the later regime and its allies’ military campaign to regain control of Syria.
A decade has passed and the regime collapsed, but al-Qusayr remains a space ruptured by voids, absences, and emptiness.1 A land stripped bare may stand in stark contrast to the joy, dancing, and celebrations following December 8, 2024. Yet, for many, it is a landscape that coexists with the act of returning and homecoming, which, until recently, were merely labors of imagination nurtured by memories of the past. For Abdu, who was forced to flee in the early days of the revolution, these were dreams that seemed impossible to fulfill in his lifetime. For Veronica, what life in al-Qusayr once was –and what it could be in the future– remained a recurring thread during her time spent in Lebanon with the community Abdu belongs to, and afterward.
The feasibility of repairing these remnants in the absence of electricity and essential services is a constant, urgent dilemma, as families wait for life to slowly return to its natural rhythm.
Since 2013, the community has carefully shrouded in silence stories of siege, repression, and expulsion, as well as Hezbollah’s occupation of the land closer to the border. What it did not silence was the beauty of al-Qusayr’s nature. The natural landscape endured as a vivid part of its everyday life: plants decorated corners of the informal school and settlement the community built, painted on external walls whenever possible, nostalgically evoked by everyone. Today, the image of a once-fertile, flourishing countryside has been replaced by a different reality– a land uprooted from its history before the war and occupation. Return is a confrontation with al-Qusayr’s recent past – the history of the land during occupation. Qusayris learnt about the contours of what life in occupied al-Qusayr became through word of mouth or pictures that circulated among them. They also listened carefully to the tales of those exceptionally allowed to return to al-Qusayr after the Battle and that, sometimes, visited their relatives forced to exile in Lebanon.2 However, most Qusayris never witnessed firsthand the effects of the occupation. In this recent history of the land, they themselves became the void.
The trees, once a defining feature of the land and its lush nature, are now gone. The same fate occurred to many forests and orchards made fertile by the Orontes River [al-Assi]. Their disappearance began with the destructive force of the counterinsurgency and continued afterwards by other means. Most of the remaining trees became a mere commodity, cut down and likely sold in Lebanese markets. In some cases, the uprooting of trees marked the first step in transforming orchards into an agricultural field for the cultivation of wheat, vegetables, or even hashish. Other orchards survived but with younger trees. The old ones, cared for by generations upon generations–a symbol of the history of this land and its people– are no longer there. These transformations unfolded alongside changes to maps and documents that bore the names of those who took ownership of the land. These ‘temporary owners’ abandoned it to seek refuge in Lebanon following Hezbollah’s withdrawal as soon as the collapse of the regime became inevitable. The homes they once occupied, now abandoned, became sites for a new cycle of ta’fysh [looting].
Mafiyaat [groups of criminals from the area] plundered what remained from objects and furniture to wires, windows, and doors. Prior 2013, these groups operated across Syria and Lebanon, engaging in smuggling drugs, people, and goods –activities they combined with their meagre salaries from agricultural labor. As many of them, displaced in Lebanon, had reconciled with the regime and Hezbollah upon their return to Syria, they resumed these smuggling activities armed with weapons provided by the governing forces. In a bitter twist of irony, these mafiyaat now declare themselves revolutionaries while selling looted objects to returnees, who fear their presence at night as isolated, newly-inhabited homes become easy targets for their activities.
Return is also an ultimate act of mourning not only for the landscape, but also for the loved ones whose lives were violated and stolen. Return is, too, an intense and unbearable renewal of this pain — as if they disappeared yesterday.
Despite these insecurities, Qusayris continue to assert their right to return, even if this right requires them to reckon with this landscape in ruins. Those homes still standing bear the traces of the war, compounded by a decade of abandonment. The feasibility of repairing these remnants in the absence of electricity and essential services is a constant, urgent dilemma, as families wait for life to slowly return to its natural rhythm. This, however, also requires mending social ties with those who benefitted from the expulsion and occupation, including informants among displaced Qusayris, whose identities are no longer hidden.
A return to a bare land is not an undoing of this recent history, but an act of rewriting it and an attempt to filling up its voids. Return may fulfil its promise of repairing fractured relations–to rights, lands, homes, even to another person, family and collectivity. Yet, return is also an ultimate act of mourning not only for the landscape, but also for the loved ones whose lives were violated and stolen. Return is, too, an intense and unbearable renewal of this pain –as if they disappeared yesterday, as if they were imprisoned just last night. The voids punctuating this bare land are open wounds whose depth our words cannot even try to capture. Amidst the silences, however, we also find the voices of the returnees. An activist friend of Abdu –whom Veronica met in Tripoli during many discussions about rights for displaced Syrians in Lebanon– sent a voice message. His words mixed with tears inform him, us, about his return to al-Qusayr al-hurr [free al-Qusayr]. He awaits Abdo’s return so they can resume the work they started in Lebanon and had long hoped to carry out in Syria. As we rewind the message, Abdo whispers, “We thought this was only a dream.”
Featured image: The city of al-Qusayr after the fall of the al-Assad regime, photo by authors.
References
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Chulov, Martin. 2013. “Syrian Town of Qusair Falls to Hezbollah in Breakthrough for Assad”, The Guardian. 5th June. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/05/syria-army-seizes-qusair. Last access 7th June 2025.
Dzenovska, Dace. 2020. “Emptiness: Capitalism without People in the Latvian Countryside.” American Ethnologist 47 (1): 10-26.
Dzenovska, Dace, and Daniel M. Knight. 2020. “Emptiness: An Introduction.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, December 15th. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/emptiness-an-introduction. Last access 8th June, 2025.
Ferrari, Veronica. 2018. A State of Permanent Loss: War and Displacement in Syria and Lebanon. Unpublished PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London.
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Gordillo, Gaston R. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham: Duke University Press.
MegaphoneNews, 2024. After Assad’s fall and the liberation of al-Qusayr, Mahmoud decided to return to his home, despite the destruction it had suffered. Reel, 17th December. Available at https://www.instagram.com/reel/DDsKUC6pICR/?igsh=cTQ4b3hubjViczhx. Last access 9th June 2025.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1-18.
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
- This piece examines emptiness—through its constituent elements of voids and absences—to understand the landscape that Qusayris encountered upon returning home, elements that had equally defined their experience of displacement. We draw on the work of Dace Dzenovska and Daniel Knight (Dzenovska, 2020; Dzenovska and Knight, 2020), who analyze emptiness as both a concrete spatial-temporal coordinate and an affective structure producing lives in suspension within global capitalism and state power. In al-Qusayr’s context, however, emptiness emerges as the byproduct of political violence—war and occupation—that systematically erased the history of the land and its communities before and after the 2011 revolution. This emptiness, manifested as bare land, functions simultaneously as physical space and affective condition. It reflects aspects of the past political and military struggle that remain illegible even to those who experienced it firsthand. Emptiness, thus, represents not merely absence, but the impossibility of engaging with a fractured history; it embodies a moral judgment held in suspension. The landscape of this bare land recalls the rubbles described by Gordillo (2014) as a space prior to ruination (Stoller, 2008; Navaro-Yashin, 2009). However, the voids we describe emerge in these moments and spaces of illegibility, fracture, and suspension produced by the war and its aftermath. In this text, voids precede absences (Bille et al., 2010). The latter refer to a loss that can finally be mourned; absences ↩︎
- Exile, for many Syrians, was described as the only outcome to avoid imprisonment or forced disappearance due to their wanted status within the al-Assad regime’s state security apparatus (Ferreri, 2022). Most became a muwatin matluub [wanted citizen] due to military defection, draft evasion and political activism—including participation in the 2011 peaceful protests or providing aid to besieged areas. Inhabitants of besieged areas—such as Ghouta, al-Qusayr, and others—were also declared wanted. During the Battle of al-Qusayr, all inhabitants were forced to leave their homes, even those few subsequently allowed to return (Ferreri, 2018). In the attempt to regain control over areas controlled by rebel factions, the regime and its allies implemented a process of selective expulsion of the inhabitants of these besieged areas based on security checks and “reconciliation agreements.” For those who could not reconcile with the regime, their forced displacement was typically executed through the infamous green buses. ↩︎
Abstract: After a decade of displacement, Syrian families are returning to their homes and lands in al-Qusayr, located close to the Syria-Lebanon borderin western Syria. A once-fertile region renowned for its orchards, the region is now reduced to a bare land. We reflect on how this ‘bare land’ encapsules the physical devastation while serving as a metaphor describing Qusayris’ affective state –beneath joy– as they confront the voids and absences that now define home.
