The Washington post
The end of Syria's brutal civil war is not in sight. The combatants are locked in a grinding, attritional battle that is as complex as it is cruel. More than 250,000 Syrians have been killed over the past five years, and roughly half of the country's citizens have been forced to flee their homes.
Some of Syria's most important urban centers have been devastated by endless street fighting and aerial bombardment. Just see my colleague Loveday Morris's stark accounts and photographs from inside the country earlier this year.
While diplomats wrangle in Geneva over a nascent, faltering peace process kick-started by the United Nations, other organizations are scratching their heads over the huge challenge of reconstructing and rebuilding a country that has been torn apart. In 2014, a U.N. study suggested that it would take Syria at least three decades to recover.
The World Bank is trying to come to grips with the nuts and bolts of the destruction. Using satellite imagery of six Syrian cities, the organization came up with assessments for the damage wrought on these urban centers. A conservative estimate on the losses in public infrastructure sits at $6 billion. ("WASH" in the chart below is a shorthand for drinking water, hygiene and sanitation).
“The Bank is using cutting edge, tried and tested methods for Syria to be ready to engage when conflict abates," Ferid Belhaj, World Bank country director for the Middle East, said in a statement. “Technology can allow us to draw up realistic and actionable plans for working in Syria in a way we haven’t been able to do before — before the conflict actually ends.”
As the chart above shows, those plans will have to include a considerable effort to make up for a housing sector that has been literally reduced to rubble.
According to the World Bank's analysis of six cities, Aleppo, once Syria's most populous metropolitan center and financial capital, bore the brunt of the destruction.
World Bank
The damage to Aleppo — the site of a multi-front contest between regime forces, rebels, Kurdish militias and the Islamic State militant group — has doubled in the past two years.
Despite the bleakness of the current moment, the bank argues, diplomats and officials have to start thinking beyond the political endgame.
“Syria would have been a better place without the terrible human and physical damage done by a brutal and tragic war,” Belhaj said in his statement. “But today even before the dust settles the post-war effort needs to be launched from the region ... to create jobs and much-needed economic expansion that will help, albeit sadly only partially, restore hope and open the long and uncertain path to reconciliation and peace.”