'My home city was destroyed by war but I will not lose hope' – how modern warfare turns neighbourhoods into battlefields

By Ammar Azzouz, Research Fellow, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

It has been almost 12 years since I left my city. And I have never been able to return. Homs, the place I was born and grew up, has been destroyed and I, like many others, have been left in exile: left to remember how beautiful it once was. What can a person do when their home – that place within them that carries so much meaning – has effectively been murdered?

I have spent my academic career studying the impact of war on architecture and cities and researching acts of deliberate destruction of home, termed by scholars as domicide.…

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