The shattered landscape of Syria is a living museum, bearing the scars of wars past and present.
In January, I travelled to Rojava – the autonomous Kurdish-led region in northeast Syria – to visit Kobane and Raqqa, two cities once overrun by ISIS that played host to some of the most brutal and consequential urban battles in modern history.
There I saw how communities devastated by jihadist rule and the fight to defeat ISIS were trying to rebuild.
Huge swathes of the cities remain in ruins, the buildings still standing pockmarked by bullet holes. Unexploded ordnance and countless skeletons lurk beneath the mounds of debris that litter the streets.
But I also witnessed firsthand the new chapter of violence engulfing this part of the world.
As I drove through the town of Sirrin en-route to Raqqa, I barely registered the distant rumble of jet engines a few kilometres off to my left. It was just another sound in a place where the roar of diesel generators on which many rely for electricity and heat is ubiquitous.
Then came the blast. Just a few hundred metres from my position, a pair of punishing explosions sent a towering column of dust and debris skyward and a shockwave rippling through our vehicle.
It was a Turkish airstrike.
Had we left a few minutes earlier, or had the pilot chosen a slightly different target, I might not be here to tell this story. Days earlier, a similar strike had hit a civilian convoy I had been invited to join, killing several people.
This is daily life in Rojava now – a place haunted by the ghost of war with ISIS, now caught in the crosshairs of new, relentless threats.
WATCH: Daily Mail Frontline on YouTube: Revisiting the cities ISIS destroyed in 2025
Smoke rises from a pair of Turkish airstrikes in Rojava’s countryside a few hundred metres from my position
In January, I travelled to Rojava – the autonomous Kurdish-led region in northeast Syria – and saw firsthand the dangers and threats to which its people are subjected
Naim Square in Raqqa under ISIS control, and now in 2025
FILE PHOTO – Smoke rises over Syrian town of Kobane after an airstrike, as seen from the Mursitpinar border crossing on the Turkish-Syrian border in the southeastern town of Suruc in Sanliurfa province, October 18, 2014
Walking into Kobane, you are confronted by obliterated buildings and the rusted husks of tanks and armoured vehicles
A year after its official formation in 2013, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria embarked on a savage rampage through northeastern Syria, ransacking towns and slaughtering and abusing their inhabitants as they constructed a caliphate.
By September 2014, a swarm of jihadists had encircled Kobane – a Kurdish majority city nestled along the Turkish border in northern Syria – and launched a full-scale assault on the city and its surrounding villages.
They rounded up and executed hundreds of people in a campaign of terror that triggered a mass exodus of some 200,000 people.
Kobane looked set to fall beneath the black flag of ISIS in a matter of days.
But this vibrant crossroads of cultures and ethnicities was saved from extermination and assimilation by the YPG and YPJ – the Kurdish People’s Protection Units.
For months, these valiant men and women stood together, battling house to house in a conflict so bitter it earned the moniker ‘the Kurdish Stalingrad’ – and earned the support of the United States and an international coalition.
Every building became an ambush site, every alleyway a potential killing field – a hellscape described in detail by my Kurdish guide who showed me around the parts of the city still demolished.
Standing beside a mural erected at a building in which a senior YPG commander died fighting alongside his comrades, he said: ‘It was hell. We fought room to room, ISIS were right there.
‘They were throwing grenades through our windows… Holding the bombs by hand and dropping them next to us.
‘We had no choice but to go through these buildings one by one. They were everywhere – in front, behind you, next to you.’
As if to prove his point, moments later he clambered into the ruins of what he said was a structure used by ISIS as a field hospital.
Within a few seconds of pulling away rocks and digging through the rubble, he was holding up chunks of what were unmistakably human bone.
A little more digging and he was able to produce three vertebrae of a jihadist’s spinal column, along with parts of skull and a jawbone.
Moments later, as I was trying to compute just how many skeletons were lurking beneath the piles of debris surrounding this dystopian scene, he said bluntly: ‘Anyway… let’s go.’
He opened his hand and let the bones tumble unceremoniously to the ground. Then, one by one, our guides and translators slammed the heel of their boots into the remnants of the skeleton and ground them into the dirt.
Acres upon acres of Kobane and several other cities in northern Syria seems almost post-apocalyptic
My guide takes me deeper into the war museum district of Kobane, left untouched since ISIS was ousted
‘Look – here’s a human spine. That’s an ISIS spine’. My guide shows me a selection of vertebrae uncovered at the site of an airstrike on an ISIS position in Kobane in 2014
A wrecked tank lies partially buried at Arin Mirkan Square in the centre of Kobane
Much of Kobane has been left untouched since the bitter fight against ISIS with broken, rusted artillery batteries, tanks and armoured vehicles scattered amid the destroyed houses
After months of brutal combat, the ISIS scourge was finally expelled and Kobane was declared liberated on January 26, 2015.
It was a stunning victory that proved a turning point in the global fight against ISIS, whose caliphate collapsed four years later.
Within weeks, tens of thousands of residents had returned and the war-torn community set about rebuilding.
Although roughly 70% of the infrastructure was damaged in the battle to liberate Kobane, ISIS never managed to conquer the entire city.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Raqqa.
This city, located further south in Rojava on the banks of the Euphrates River, was completely overrun by ISIS and served as its stronghold in Syria, from 2014 until the group was eventually forced out in 2017.
Much like in Kobane, Kurdish troops were forced to go house to house under fire from heavy weapons, IEDs and suicide bombers to eliminate the jihadists, while US drones and warplanes struck from above.
Now, where the extremists once tortured and executed their captives for the world to see, families and friends are free to relax and meet to watch the world pass by – just like they did before ISIS arrived.
But because Raqqa was under total ISIS control, the destruction here was absolute.
Not only do you see the fallout of war everywhere – you experience it with your other senses.
Much of the city remains without power and hot water, and desperate refugees have no choice but to burn plastic and rubbish to keep warm.
Before long my nose became stuffy and my throat itchy, thanks in part to the toxic smoke, but also the thick dust that coats every surface.
This is the pulverized remnants of destroyed buildings, which are whipped up by the slightest breeze and blown into your stinging, irritated eyes.
Of all the places I visited during my time in Rojava, Raqqa was where I felt the most uneasy.
Perhaps I was simply not used to witnessing such devastation, but the atmosphere felt tense as though chaos could break out again at a moment’s notice.
For the people of Rojava though, this feeling is nothing new.
Raqqa is still in ruins almost 8 years after ISIS was ousted
This city, located further south in Rojava on the banks of the Euphrates River, was completely overrun by ISIS and served as its stronghold in Syria, from 2014 until the group was eventually forced out in 2017
Of all the places I visited during my time in Rojava, Raqqa was where I felt the most uneasy
A member loyal to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) waves an ISIS flag in Raqqa, Syria
A fighter of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army faction fires from a turret mounted in the back of a ‘technical’ pickup truck deployed at a position near the Tishrin Dam in the vicinity of Manbij
The shocking ouster of former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and the toppling of his cruel regime in December by HTS triggered yet more instability in Syria and Rojava.
The Syrian National Army – a militant group bolstered by Turkish funding, intelligence and air support – have for weeks been surging through communities previously administered by Rojava’s governing authorities, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).
Meanwhile, Turkey – whose autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees the Kurdish authorities and militias in Rojava as terrorists – is sending drones and warplanes to pound civilian convoys protesting the hostilities.
After widespread reports of the ransacking of Kurdish neighbourhoods, forced displacement and summary executions of Kurdish prisoners and hospitalised fighters in towns in and around the city of Manbij, the SNA is now bearing down on the Qara Qozaq bridge over the Euphrates River while launching attacks in and around the Tishrin Dam.
This vital piece of infrastructure provides electricity for much of western Rojava, including the entire city of Kobane and Raqqa, and its collapse would cause untold environmental damage.
Dozens of civilians have been killed and hundreds wounded following airstrikes conducted by Turkey, while the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – the Rojava’s Kurdish-led militia composed primarily YPG and YPJ units – continue to repel SNA advances.
Turkey is keen to see Syria ruled by HTS – an outcome that would strengthen Turkey’s leverage, boost its economy as Turkish companies help rebuild Syria, and weaken the SDF.
But the war-weary people of Rojava are wary of Syria’s new leadership.
Rojava has built a secular political system centred around grassroots democracy, where every ethnic and religious group has a say – an approach completely at odds with HTS’ vision of an Islamic state.
Now, Syria is at a new crossroads, with the very real prospect of another civil war on the horizon.
