Two journeys through Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, 2025.
Children play football in front of a pockmarked wall and damaged buildings in Syria, 2025.Photograph by Laurin Strele
Syria Two journeys, 2025
Bashar al-Assad’s rule ended in December 2024. During two journeys through Syria in early and later 2025, I travelled between Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo. The political rupture was immediate; daily life changed more unevenly.
In streets and interiors marked by war, people prayed, mourned, traded, played cards, worked and raised children. These photographs do not describe freedom as a finished state. They follow its uncertainty, and the lives continuing inside it.
Hands rest on folded green-and-white flag fabric marked with a red star in Syria, 2025.A bearded man looks into the camera beside stacked bags and boxes, Syria, 2025.A boy stands before heavily damaged apartment blocks, Syria, 2025.Pedestrians and a cyclist pass the opening of a damaged building; a mountain landscape survives on an interior wall, Syria, 2025.A dog looks through a dark opening amid collapsed masonry, Syria, 2025.A lone man stands inside the shell of a vast damaged building, Syria, 2025.
Content note: The following photograph shows human remains.
Human remains lie exposed in a shallow opening beside a damaged masonry wall, Syria, 2025.Children climb on a weathered amusement ride in front of destroyed apartment blocks, Syria, 2025.A destroyed tank lies beside an empty desert road, Syria, 2025.A lone visitor crosses the remains of a damaged ancient stone theatre, Syria, 2025.A large painted religious statue overlooks a town in Syria, 2025.An armed man stands on a toppled monumental sculpture, Syria, 2025.A lone person stands amid rubble inside a heavily damaged hall, Syria, 2025.Worshippers bow during prayer inside a mosque, reflected across a glass partition, Syria, 2025.Men play cards around a small table in a tiled interior, Syria, 2025.A woman pauses beneath rows of brightly coloured dresses displayed against a stone wall, Syria, 2025.An older man holds a cigarette and looks into the camera, Syria, 2025.A boy holds a rifle inside a domestic interior, Syria, 2025.A large congregation gathers inside a church in Syria, 2025.Two women, one wearing a cross and one a headscarf, stand side by side during a gathering, Syria, 2025.A man with bandages on his head stands among a crowd, Syria, 2025.A woman covers her mouth during a crowded gathering, Syria, 2025.A young woman with facial bandages rests in a hospital bed as two visitors stand beside her, Syria, 2025.Children spin on a weathered playground ride in front of damaged apartment blocks, Syria, 2025.
