After fourteen years away, researcher Cécile Boëx returns to Damascus, Syria, a few months after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 8, 2024. The city is unrecognizable. To understand what is emerging, she must embrace a sense of disorientation, walk, look, and listen. This book is a personal account of that journey. It is also woven with images—those that shape our memory of the conflict and others that help us grasp the fragile reality of the aftermath: that moment when certainties crumble along with regimes, when everything is being reshaped, and when new fault lines emerge. Unlike war reports, *Return to Damascus* recounts one of the rarest moments in history: the moment when a country attempts to emerge from war without yet knowing what kind of peace awaits it.