'Capital of the revolution' now a ghost town

Two years after the last Syrian rebels left the besieged Old City of Homs, voices echo through the shells of bombed-out buildings, their upper floors tilted at odd angles as though frozen in time.

"There is no danger here, because there isn't anybody," a soldier said as gunfire rang out in the distance. "No gunmen, not a soul, not even animals, nothing. Only concrete." He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Some 1,200 rebels and civilians, many of them wounded and starving from a yearlong siege, withdrew from the last remaining strongholds in the ancient heart of Homs in May 2014, surrendering to government forces a bloodstained city once dubbed the "capital of the revolution".