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On 11 August 2016, Khaled Khatib slipped out of the besieged Aleppo city. That summer, as the Assad regime tightened the noose around rebel-held parts of the town, a brief counter-offensive burst through the regime’s lines, providing a vital route in and Khaled’s route out.����

But it closed almost as soon as it opened. Khaled would not see his hometown again for eight years.����

“I almost forgot Aleppo,” he says, sitting in the winter sunshine less than a mile from its famous citadel.

“There was no hope of returning. For years the regime bombed the country like crazy, they wanted to kill everyone, and then they just disappeared in a matter of days. I still can’t believe it.”��

Khaled, 29, is a member of the Syria Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets. He signed up in 2013 when rebel groups controlled half the city.

Once it fell to the regime in December 2016, he and his colleagues were forced to live in exile, seeking refuge in the small corner of northwest Syria that remained in rebel hands.��

When Hayat Tahrir al-Sham burst out of the Idlib province in late November, the White Helmets were as surprised as anyone.

But they did not hesitate to follow, eager to return home with the skills and equipment needed to provide the essential services the regime had destroyed or given up on.��������

In Aleppo, they have taken over an old fire station just north of the city’s historic centre. The place bustles with activity, the mood joyous as the volunteers mill about the courtyard cracking jokes and washing down their fleet of vehicles��— fire engines, water trucks, ambulances, and bulldozers.����

Out on the streets, they have begun clearing rubble from public spaces and, as if to prove their true civil defence credentials, they even found time to rescue two cats.����

It was in Aleppo that the White Helmets first came to the world’s attention. The battle for the city was one of the darkest chapters in Syria’s civil war. As many as 30,000 people were killed during the fighting, culminating in a brutal siege imposed by the regime on the rebel-held eastern districts.��

The footage of the volunteers pulling children from the wreckage caused by Assad’s barrel bombs and Russian warplanes — captured on their helmet cameras��— was beamed around the world, providing a rare insight into the horrors unfolding on the ground.����

All of the volunteers lost friends and family in Aleppo. Mohammad Hussein, one of the men now back working in the station, lost three of his brothers.

Aleppo became synonymous with ‘double-tap’ airstrikes — Russian planes would hit a location once, await the arrival of rescue services, and return to hit it again. Twenty White Helmet volunteers were killed during the siege, and many more were injured.����

But despite global acclaim for their bravery, the international community did nothing to relieve the pressure of the siege, leaving the regime and Russia free to roam the skies over Syria for a decade from 2015 until its spectacular collapse just a few weeks ago.����

In exile, the White Helmets stuck to their mission of providing civil defence services to the local population, and now with the regime gone, they look set to play a major role in rebuilding the country.����

“I’m proud because we used the time we were displaced from our homes to organise ourselves, to train and gain experience,” says Khaled. “And now we’re back in Aleppo with those skills and knowledge.”����

The organisation occupies a unique position in Syrian society. It has a close working relationship with HTS after many years of providing essential services in Idlib, and it has the financial support of the international community.

Raed al-Saleh, the long-time head of the organisation, was the guest of Syria’s de facto new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in Damascus last week. At the same time, donors have already begun to increase funding, with the UK offering an additional £300,000 on 6 December.

But the scale of reconstruction needed across the country is immense. After 14 years of war, whole towns lie in ruins, their homes looted, infrastructure destroyed and connections to public utilities severed.��

Despite their joy in being able to serve their hometown once again, few White Helmets in Aleppo are thinking about moving back permanently anytime soon.����

“Aleppo is not a place you can return to easily,” says Ismael Alabdullah, who joined the volunteers in 2013 and is now living in Sarmada, 40 km west of Aleppo, after being forced from Aleppo in 2016.��

“We want to come back, but it may take a year. Right now there are no services, no schools. Prices are up, salaries are down. People cannot afford to put meat on the table. But whatever happens, there’s no detention anymore and no bombing, so the future is good.”��

Khaled takes me on a tour of the station. It’s in a terrible state of disrepair and the White Helmets’ well-maintained fire engines gleam amongst their gloomy surroundings.

“This building is an example of how the regime was serving civilians,” he says.����

Around the walls of the courtyard, the former occupants had painted the old pro-regime chant, “With soul, with blood, we sacrifice for you, Bashar.”

But someone has climbed up on one of the White Helmets’ cranes, and a large red X now effaces the former tyrant’s name.

It is perhaps the first lick of paint the city has seen since the war began.��

Andrew Waller is an independent journalist and photographer covering politics and foreign policy in Western Asia

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