KOBANI, Syria — A heap of dust is all that remains of the house where Alan Kurdi was born and raised, before war sent his family fleeing and he drowned on the short sea crossing between Turkey and Greece.
The image of the toddler’s lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach turned him into an instant symbol of the suffering of Syrians so desperate to reach Europe that they are prepared to risk their lives making the dangerous journey.
His flattened home, destroyed in U.S. airstrike in the landmark battle for control of the Syrian town of Kobani last year, has not been so widely seen. It is just one of thousands of buildings leveled, among hundreds of thousands more that have been obliterated in Syria during the 4-year-old war.
As the conflict drags into a fifth year with no end in sight, little heed is being paid to the enormity of the havoc being wreaked on the country. Some 2.1 million homes, half the country’s hospitals and more than 7,000 schools have been destroyed, according to the United Nations.
The cost of the damage so far is estimated at a staggering $270 billion — and rebuilding could run to more than $300 billion, according to Abdallah al-Dardari, a former Syrian government minister who heads the National Agenda for Syria program at the U.N.’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. That’s more than 10 times the amount spent by the United States on reconstruction in Iraq, with few discernible results.
If or when the war ends, any government will find itself “ruling over a pile of rubble,” Dardari said. “I don’t know who will fund this.”
The immense human toll is a far more immediate and obvious concern. As many as 250,000 people are dead, 1 million have been wounded, 7.6 million are displaced within Syria and 4 million have fled across the borders, according to the U.N.
The numbers rise daily with each new airstrike and each new offensive launched, as Russian planes join Syrian and American ones in bombing the country and the various factions sustain their relentless attacks on one another with rockets, mortars and artillery.
So, too, does the damage, compounding the tragedy in small and unseen ways that also kill people or drive them to seek new lives elsewhere. The more buildings are flattened, the more homes, shops and businesses are lost, the greater the incentive to flee the country — and the less people will have to return to whenever the war finally ends.
“We’re allowing a level of destruction we will never have the means to address,” said Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group. “They’re wiping one city after another off the map.”
Kobani offers just a glimpse of the wider devastation being inflicted around Syria. The war here was brief by comparison to some of the battles still raging elsewhere, but it was fierce. The Islamic State attacked in September last year, surged into the town, then by January had been driven out by local Kurdish forces aided by U.S. strikes.
The victory has repeatedly been held out by President Barack Obama and other U.S. officials as one of the greatest triumphs of the war so far, a David and Goliath encounter in which outgunned and outnumbered Kurdish fighters held at bay then eventually defeated wave after wave of invaders.
But in those four short months, much of the town was reduced to rubble. Barely a street or a building was untouched. Whole neighborhoods lie in ruins.
And Kobani is by no means the worst afflicted of the communities ravaged by war, many of which have been fought over continuously for the past four years. In the northern metropolis of Aleppo, one of Syria’s major cities, more than 14,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, mostly in airstrikes conducted by the Syrian government, according to satellite imagery studied by the United Nations.
