“HUNGER is a killer,” says Burhan, a 22-year-old rebel fighter who left Homs under a deal between the regime of Bashar Assad and rebel forces in February. On May 7th the remaining rebels in Homs’s old city agreed to leave too, handing the city over to regime control. The deal was brokered by Iran, Damascus's main ally, after the last rebel-held neighbourhood had been besieged by Mr Assad's troops for two years. Two buses left that evening carrying the first of around 900 fighters as well as 150 injured and sick people. In return, rebels released some hostages, reported to include Iranians. Syrian rebels framed the withdrawal as a sign of the opposition’s humanity—refusing, unlike the regime, to cause residents of the city to suffer further. The regime has surrounded rebel-held districts, shelling them as well as blocking food from entering and people from leaving in an attempt to force locals to submit. “The most important thing is that our men, children and women do not die,” says Raghad, an activist in Damascus.

But other Syrians bemoaned the deal, seeing it as a blow in the fight against Mr Assad, which started with peaceful protests in 2011. Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, is especially symbolic. Its people wholeheartedly joined the uprising, leading Syrians to dub it the “capital of the revolution”. Campaigners and journalists such as Bassel Shehade, a Christian filmmaker from Damascus, flocked there, often, like Mr Shehade, paying with their lives. “We failed the city, we failed the brave people who managed to stay there until today despite hunger and violence,” says Eyad, a-34-year-old architect from Homs.

On May 10thpeople who had been displaced by the fighting returned to find rubble where their streets, houses and businesses used to be. Some contrasted the image of Mr Assad’s troops patrolling the main square with April 2011, when the same square was the site of a huge sit-in by Homs residents. Back then there were “people from all ages and different religions and sects”, says a young man recently released after nine months detained by security forces. Now there are “army personnel forcing an Assad flag onto a destroyed statue once known as the clock of Homs”.

For the regime, the fall of Homs helps secure the north-south highway that runs from the capital, Damascus, to the coast. Rebels remain in the countryside, but are being increasingly pushed away from the Lebanese border, an access point for supplies. Sectarian tensions between the Sunni majority from which the rebels are drawn, and Mr Assad’s Alawite sect, run high in Homs. Homs’s residents have long suspected that the regime wants to turn the city into the capital of the Alawite area in the coastal area just to the north.

Many Syrians are losing hope. “It is two countries now,” says a Syrian in Damascus. “Homs is the capital of the Alawites and the north is another country controlled by extremists.” They fear Homs will whisper its history as Hama, a town razed by Mr Assad’s father in the 1980s, has long done. “My dad used to hate visiting Hama,” says Dalia, an artist originally from the city. “He said ‘here is where your grandfather’s shop used to be. There was your uncle’s bookstore’.” Homs's children may now be told the same stories about their districts.