HOMS, Syria — This city’s last rebel stronghold, once a well-to-do neighborhood in Homs of wide streets and high-rise apartments, is today a ghost of its former self.

After a siege by Syrian government forces that lasted three and a half years, only a fraction of the population remains in the area, known as Al Waer. Its high rises, bombed and shelled, look as though they had been punched by giants. Its streets are piled with burned-out cars and television sets, and its biggest hospital is so wrecked that barely two of the 10 floors are usable. Its oxygen tank is punctured.

If Al Waer, reclaimed by the government this past spring, symbolizes President Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless triumph, it also embodies a looming challenge as the war approaches an end: the politics of reconstruction.

That challenge is as acute for Mr. Assad as it is for his Western critics. Can they afford to pour money into a regime that has starved, bombed and occasionally gassed its own people? Or, having failed to topple Mr. Assad, who — with help from Russia and Iran — has reclaimed much of the territory he lost over nearly seven years of war, can the West abandon the people of Syria to live in the ruins?