War-torn Homs, Syria

People line up at a government checkpoint to enter the rebel-held neighborhood of Waer. Before the war, Sunnis, Shiites and Christians coexisted peacefully in Homs.

Mohammed Ali Nouh, in background, is one of the few shop owners who have reopened for business in Old Homs, where residents use bicylces because public transportation is nonexistent.

Workers rebuild a shop near the city’s old souk. The souk’s specialty areas — including the gold market, the metalwork and woodcraft bazaars, the section featuring ladies’ goods — remain deserted.

Shoppers head to a government-run bakery the size of an airplane hangar that sits along the tense border between rebel-controlled Waer and government-held territory. “Here we feed everyone; they are all our citizens,” says the bakery manager, Hussein Amin, 59.

The bakery’s sizzling gas ovens churn out tens of thousands of circular flatbreads daily for consumption on both sides of the divide.

Posters in the pro-government Zahra district commemorate martyrs, including those killed in the civil war.

A 13-year-old girl does her homework in a school turned shelter for displaced families. Her family escaped from Waer and now lives in the shelter in the Baba Amr district.

The dense warren of Old Homs was once a vibrant and religiously diverse home to more than 300,000 people; fewer than 30,000 remain, according to official estimates.

A rusted tank in Old Homs.

A poster of President Bashar Assad in Old Homs.