But a visa didn’t mean permission to roam freely.

Almost everywhere we went, we were chaperoned by government minders, several soldiers and armed plainclothes agents from Syria’s powerful intelligence apparatus. Occasionally introducing themselves as “journalists,” the agents would stand next to us during nearly every conversation with a Syrian. If it was hard for us to talk to people, it was scary for them.

At best, we got a narrow, loyalist’s-eye view of Syria: No one we spoke to blamed the Assad government for the catastrophe that had consumed Syria. Economic collapse was always the fault of American sanctions, not the war or corruption.

‘We All Have the Same Sad Stories’

The minders were eager to show us that life was returning to normal. This was simple enough in Damascus, which had largely avoided physical damage.

Two minutes into our drive from Damascus to Douma, however, the scene outside our car window switched abruptly from a city in motion to a field of inert gray rubble. It seemed to go on for miles, the cigarette ash of the war: apartment buildings that resembled open-air parking garages, doorways spewing gray dust, minarets sticking askew out of the wreckage like half-melted candles in a cake.

The destruction had a bleak sameness to it, the warplanes and artillery having obliterated all but a few fingerholds of humanity. It made it easy to forget that this hadn’t always been rubble — that these had once been homes.

In Douma, the downtown souk had a slow-but-steady trickle of customers looking for fruit and cut-rate housewares. But more than a year after the government broke the rebel hold there with a siege that reduced people to eating grass, much of the city remained nearly uninhabitable.

You could tell where people had started moving back in, essentially camping amid hills of rubble, by the dirty tarps that served as walls for apartments that no longer had them.