BEIRUT -- After more than four years of street fighting and aerial bombardments, the staggering extent of destruction in Aleppo is beginning to emerge: Tens of thousands of homes and apartments are uninhabitable, most factories have been looted or destroyed, and some ancient landmarks have been reduced to rubble.
Reconstruction will take years and cost tens of billions of dollars, experts say. Some of Aleppo's centuries-old cultural heritage is likely lost forever. And healing the wounds in a city once split between a wealthier, pro-government west and a poorer, pro-rebel east is likely to take years of effort.
In recent months, rebels rapidly lost ground in the beleaguered city as President Bashar Assad and military allies Russia and Iran stepped up their attacks there. Syria announced Thursday that it had assumed full control of the city, although rebels are still based in the western and southwestern suburbs.
After the months of airstrikes, Aleppo "resembles those cities that were stricken during World War II," said Maamoun Abdul-Karim, head of the government's museums and archaeology department. The scale of devastation has already evoked comparisons with cities like Grozny, Chechnya -- devastated in 1999-2000 fighting -- and Dresden, Germany, that saw widespread destruction in World War II.
[TIMELINE: Key events in Aleppo since the start of Syria’s uprising ]
It's a dramatic change from the time before the war, when Aleppo was Syria's biggest city, with more than 3 million residents and world-famous cuisine.
Located at the crossroads of ancient trade routes, Aleppo served as the country's industrial hub, home to factories producing textiles, plastics and pharmaceuticals. Its ancient center, recognized as a World Heritage site, drew large numbers of tourists.
The fighting's destruction isn't spread evenly throughout Aleppo. Areas once held by the opposition have severe damage. Some eastern neighborhoods look like they have been hit by an earthquake.
In parts of the government-held west, children attended schools, adults went to work, and restaurants and coffee shops were packed.
U.N. satellite images identified more than 33,500 damaged residential buildings in the city, with the most recent photos taken in mid-September, according to a map published last week.
The map indicated that the most intense damage occurred in rebel-held areas. The analysis considered only residential areas and excluded industrial zones. After the images were taken, the Syrian government and its allies intensified bombardments in the final phase of the Aleppo offensive.
A Syrian urban consultant said Aleppo had a pre-war stock of about 550,000 housing units at a total value of about $50 billion.
The fighting in the city has caused close to $25 billion in loss of housing, said the consultant, who is involved in data collection and requested anonymity.
The consultant estimated that more than 60 percent of the homes and apartments in Aleppo are still inhabitable, including those with partial damage. He put the cost of reconstruction at between $35 billion and $40 billion.
Potentially, 250,000 people could return to the city's eastern areas -- once home to half of Aleppo's pre-war population -- and find shelter by bricking up holes in walls and replacing shattered windows with plastic sheets, he said.
Industrial base gone
Aleppo's industrial base is largely wiped out, including by looting, the consultant said. Before the war, close to 5,000 small and mid-sized enterprises had industrial licenses in Aleppo, he said.
Exiled business partners Bassam Hajjar and George Saghir, who own a factory for plastic bottles and bottle caps, described widespread damage to factories.
"Most of the businesses in the area are destroyed," Hajjar said.
The pair's factory is close to Castello Road, once the main link between the countryside and rebel-held areas in the city. Hajjar said rebels looted the factory, grabbing raw materials, generators and parts of large machinery.
The business partners said it's too risky to resume operations there now. Most of the time, there's no electricity and water in the city, they said. Also, the war in Syria continues, as do economic sanctions against the Assad government.
Abdul-Karim, the Syrian government official, declined comment on the damage estimates.
However, he said more than half of Aleppo's fiercely contested ancient center has varying degrees of damage. The densely populated area, recognized in 1986 as a UNESCO World Heritage site, contains a 13th century Citadel, a 12th century Great Mosque and ancient markets.
More than 150 buildings in the old city were damaged, Abdul-Karim said. That includes more than half of the area of the old markets and parts of the facade of the Great Mosque, whose minaret was destroyed in 2012.
"We need a lot of time and billions of dollars to reconstruct the city," he said, adding that "it will be useless to talk about reconstruction without security and stability."
Repairs at the Great Mosque would be a priority, and Syria will seek UNESCO's help, he said.
A video posted online last week by the Syrian military showed government officials inspecting the damage at the mosque.
Mohammed al-Obeid, a senior religious official in the city, said on the video that restorations would begin soon and that every stone in damaged sections of the mosque has been numbered.
The city's emotional wounds will be harder to heal.
"You had one half of the city trying to go on with life as normal, going out, eating, drinking," said Amr al-Azm, a Syria expert at Shawnee State University in Ohio, referring to the western neighborhoods. "A few meters away [in the east], you had the most appalling conditions, really inhumane conditions."
Attacks continue
Assessments of the ruin in the city emerged even as damage and loss of life continued Saturday with an explosion in eastern Aleppo. A correspondent for Lebanon's Hezbollah-run Al-Manar TV was reporting live from the area when a blast sounded in the background, sending up a cloud of dust.
Syria said the explosion was caused by a device left inside a school by Syrian rebels, who withdrew from their last remaining enclave last week under a cease-fire deal after more than four years of fighting.
Syrian state TV said three people were wounded. The Al-Manar TV correspondent said at least three people were killed.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said an airstrike last week on Atareb -- one of Aleppo's western suburbs -- killed five people. The Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective, said the airstrikes killed seven people. An airstrike Saturday on Atareb came after airstrikes on nearby villages the night before killed three rebels, according to the Observatory.
The civil war's wounds also have reached the capital, Damascus. The Syrian Arab News Agency said militants last week blew up the Barada water pipeline in the suburb of Kafr al-Zayt.
The news service quoted Hussam Hreidin, the director of Damascus and Damascus Countryside Water Establishment, as saying the pipeline went out of service after the attack.
Pro-government media said the government was forced to cut water supplies to the Syrian capital for a few days and use reserves instead after rebels polluted the water with diesel fuel. The al-Fija spring, which supplies Damascus with water, is in the rebel-held Barada valley northwest of the capital in a mountainous area near the Lebanese border.
Information for this article was contributed by Karin Laub, Hashem Osseiran and staff members with The Associated Press.
A Section on 12/25/2016