[Reporter] How do you reclaim a city as your own?
One so abused and disfigured
that you no longer recognize it.
How do you find light in that darkness?
In Raqqa they're still trying.
This is Paradise Square.
Anything but, during three years of ISIS rule.
The site of public executions and heads on spikes.
Today, it's been given a facelift.
Even an I love Raqqa sign
but this is a place still chasing ghosts.
Ahmad al Khabour Mohamad sold books here from the age of 16.
Until ISIS arrived and burned them.
He's kept the sign full of bullet holes.
Cigarettes weren't allowed, he says.
Women couldn't walk by themselves.
We couldn't chat like this.
It was hard.
Around the corner at the museum
looted in the early days of the war
the building then taken over by ISIS
Mehmed al Ezo says they didn't just try to destroy people's spirit
they did it.
[Reporter translates] When you see people hanged, tortured, beheaded in the square
that's what it did.
It's not just three years under ISIS rule that has traumatized the people of Raqqa
they also endured an intense bombing campaign by the U.S.-led coalition
trying to root ISIS out.
There are still only small signs of rebuilding in a universe of destruction
and war still stalks Syria.
The currency in free fall.
Vendors say they're not selling because people can't buy.
[Reporter translates] What we care about at the end of the day
is that we have something to eat, says this shepherd.
Poor people can't even afford meat.
It leaves little time for emotional healing
but there are signs of hope popping up here and there.
Back at the bookshop
al Khabour Mohamad says when ISIS burned his books
he told himself all of Syria is being destroyed
I won't cry over some books.
Today he's got Dostoyevsky on his shelves again
books from around the world.
He is reclaiming his city
by hanging on to who he is.
So Margaret has now crossed the border back into Iraq tonight
and joins us.
So Margaret, Raqqa definitely looks different than it did three years ago
when we were there
you know conflict
you know Syria
and to a degree you knew what to expect going into it
and I'm curious what's taking you off guard this time?
Adrienne, I guess the same thing that usually takes me off guard in Syria
especially when you're dealing with cities that have been so utterly destroyed
and that's the ability of the normal and the abnormal to coexist so quickly
for example outside the bookseller's shop
you know you'd see older gentlemen gathering to gossip
read the newspaper
could be anywhere
walk around the corner and all of a sudden you're
staring at a vast concrete wasteland you know
and people still manage somehow to live between the cracks,
Margaret, what do you think we should be all watching out for next?
Well there's been a worrying uptick in pro-regime airstrikes in Idlib recently
where so many civilians are taking shelter
but beyond that I'd be looking to the economic crisis you know
that's what so many people in Raqqa really wanted to talk to us about
before the war the value of the Syrian pound was about 47 to the U.S. dollar
it's now more than 4 000
and while many people would tell you that Bashar al-Assad
has more or less clinched the war
or almost clinched the war in his favour
it's also stalled to a certain effect
so it's going to be really interesting to see what the impact
of the economic crisis might be on that
Adrienne.
OK thank you, Margaret.
To you and Steph and JF
for all that reporting, thank you.