Winning the double war: Urbicide, informality, and reconstruction in Syrian cities after 2011

Syrian cities experienced extensive destruction during the 2011–2024 conflict, much of it inflicted by the Assad regime. Yet destruction did not end with the cessation of local hostilities; it persisted in formerly opposition-controlled enclaves through organized looting and mass municipal demolitions. This article asks why destruction was disproportionately concentrated in informal and formerly opposition-controlled areas, and especially at their intersection. It argues that these patterns were intentional, serving the regime’s double war: a military war to defeat the armed opposition, and an urban-economic war to incorporate undesirable urban forms into real-estate accumulation. Combining spatial autocorrelation analysis with Bayesian negative binomial and penalized logistic models across Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs, the study shows that destruction was spatially structured, concentrating where informality and opposition-control intersect, which jointly predict destruction beyond military necessity. This logic persisted across wartime, post-capture, and post-conflict periods. Urbicide thus operates as a dual-purpose modality for authoritarian urbanism: a wartime tactic and a mechanism of post-conflict socioeconomic reordering.