Reference :
V-P-SY-E-00915
Date :
05/08/2019
Caption :
Homs, Old city. This 57-year-old man, father of five children, is a tire repairer. He benefited from the ICRC microeconomic initiative programme.
Confidentiality level :
public
Publication restrictions :
publication without restrictions
Description :
“I used to have a house in the old city of Homs where I lived with my family. We were forced to flee, displaced six times because of the fighting at the time. Now we live in a rented house and not able to return home as it is destroyed and needs to be rehabilitated. My kids were very young, they even cannot remember how our house looked like. These days are not like before, it requires more efforts to secure the cost of living as the kids are growing up”, he says. "I Love Homs, it is like a heaven for me. A lot of my friends left but I did not accept to leave it and I won’t. Everywhere the stones can be rebuilt in Homs, but the most important thing is to save our humanity", he adds. "I used to have a shop myself, I was managing it. It makes me feel more secure than working in a rented shop. When I first fled, I had nothing. I had to restart building my whole life from scratches", he explains.
Millions remain displaced, and in some areas, hostilities or the uncertainty of the resumption of fighting continue. Some have found refuge with their families or friends, and possibly scraping together enough to make ends meet in parts of the country less severely affected by the conflict. Many remain in internally displaced person’s shelters, camps or make-shift settlements, having brought very little or nothing with them when they fled.
Intensified fighting will put thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, on the move. These are women, men, and children, many of whom are already extremely vulnerable. In some places, the destruction and damage to essential infrastructure and lack of basic services mean for many families deciding to return home or not, even where fighting has stopped, a dilemma.
Homs is the third-largest city in Syria, after Aleppo and Damascus. The precise population of Homs city was approximately 800,000. The city was one of the first major urban centers to be affected by the crisis. There is a large scale impact of the ongoing crisis on the city's housing, economy, infrastructure, and services. The old city is accessible since May 2014 after two years of siege which began in 2012. Following that, families started to return, facing challenges like massive destructions, absence of services and shops. They had to start their lives all over again. ICRC began to support the returnees to the old city by implementing the microeconomic initiative programme within the area in 2015.
Resolution :
4032x3024
Orientation :
landscape
Colour/B&W :
colour
