In one devastated Syrian suburb, the only sign of life is the gravedigger

Majid Ajouz and his uncle went back to washing bodies and burying them here after the regime of Bashar al-Assad collapsed in December and former residents started visiting this ancient neighborhood.

On a recent sunny afternoon, Ajouz dug a fresh grave, and mourners laid a 65-year-old man to rest amid shattered gravestones and craters left by the fighting. Little else remains of the former rebel stronghold, where more than a quarter million people lived before the civil war began in 2011.

The scale of destruction in Jobar ranks among the heaviest across Syria, an enormous challenge for a new government that needs to rebuild the shattered country to ensure stability and bring refugees back. Estimates of the nationwide cost have run to at least $400 billion for an impoverished country mostly cut off from the world by a crippling patchwork of U.S. and European sanctions.

Still, it is a crucial task. The fighting displaced about half of Syria’s prewar population of about 22 million, either abroad or to other parts of the country. Many are economically stressed and eager to return but have nothing to come back to.

Jobar and other eastern suburbs were strategically significant as gateways to the capital. The regime contested them with full force, raining down barrel bombs and even chemical weapons in fighting from 2013 until a surrender deal emptied the area in 2018.

Thousands of homes and shops, several mosques and Syria’s most revered synagogue have all been severely damaged, turned into piles of rubble and stripped of iron rods, electrical wires and ceramic tiles.

Not far from the largely spared center of Damascus, Jobar, like many devastated suburbs, cities and towns across Syria, faces the challenge of rebuilding virtually from scratch.

“They took everything. They left us nothing," said Maher Salha, who returned briefly in late January to show his 10-year-old son, who was born in internal exile, what would have been his home.

Salha, 46, used to repair shoes out of a basement workshop and had just finished renovating the family’s third-floor apartment when the civil war’s fighting ramped up and forced them to flee. His building is now a broken hulk, with rubble piled up to the second floor.

He wants the new government to provide mobile homes so that residents can at least stay on their land while they wait for reconstruction. “We want to be done with suitcases," Salha said.

The Syrian Red Crescent sent a team to Jobar in January to assess the danger of mines and unexploded ordnance.Mohammed Shaker Abu Nour fought the Assad regime for years.

Down the street, Palestinian brothers Fawzi and Ahmed Ramadan were digging a well amid heaps of stones and dust. Their parents raised them in Jobar after being forced out of Tiberias, in what is now Israel, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. If they can access water, they might consider trying to rebuild their ruined homes, they said.

Many others are waiting for international funds to start flowing. The Syrian Red Crescent sent a team to Jobar in late January to assess the danger of mines and unexploded ordnance, an early step in a long journey toward recovery. The new Damascus governor has promised to help rebuild Jobar but urged residents to be patient.

During the civil war, fighters holed up in Jobar for years, including some from the Nusra Front, which broke ties with al Qaeda, renamed itself Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and now controls Damascus. The rebels built tunnels under the residential area as regime forces imposed a devastating siege and attacked relentlessly.

The surrender deal saw the rebel holdouts, along with women and children, bused to the northwestern Idlib province. Rebels there led by HTS set up a provisional government and launched a lightning advance on key Syrian cities late last year, toppling a half-century of rule by the Assad family in just 11 days.

Among the HTS fighters who participated in the year-end operation was Jobar resident Mohammed Shaker Abu Nour, who fought the regime for years and then evacuated to Idlib with his wife and son in 2018.

“It was very hard, as if my soul was leaving my body," he said of the evacuation during a recent visit. When the rebels conquered Damascus, he came straight back to his old neighborhood.

“When I returned to my city, it was as if I was brought back to life," he said.

Weeks after the rebels seized Damascus, Abu Nour took his wife and now three children to the Jobar cemetery to pay respects to his brother and two brothers-in-law, all killed years ago during the fighting. The cemetery had been so battered that he needed help locating their gravesites.

Ajouz and his uncle last worked digging graves in Jobar’s cemetery back before 2018, by which point it had been emptied out by years of intense fighting and plundered by thieves.

During the fighting, burials only happened under the cover of darkness. Bodies were washed in a secret underground hall, then delivered to the cemetery by men who coordinated movements via walkie-talkies, Ajouz said.

He used to work as a tailor but volunteered for cemetery duties during the war, looking for a way to support the revolution without taking up arms. He said he was interrogated twice by military intelligence about burying the bodies of rebel fighters and suffered a gunshot wound in 2014.

To avoid army snipers and airstrikes, Ajouz gave himself just five minutes to conduct burials, gathering a few men who would say a short prayer together. One time they were bombed in the process, he said, injuring his brother and killing his father’s cousin.

Write to Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com