Canyons of ruins straddle almost every main street. Whole swathes of pancaked concrete buildings that were once multi-storey blocks lie crumpled across the city.

From these bomb blasted open shells, pipes, pillars, cables, and reinforced iron work are spewed out like the innards of some disemboweled animal. Virtually no building, no wall, no surface, appears to have escaped the bullets and bombs that have devastated Raqqa.

By the roadside the burnt out carapaces of vehicles, many upturned as if tossed by some giant hand, are also testimony to the destructive firepower unleashed over the months this Syrian city was fought over.

According to independent research groups that track American and Russian airstrikes in Syria, US aircraft and artillery bombarded Raqqa with an estimated 20,000 munitions during the five month operation. This is more than was dropped in all of Afghanistan in the whole of 2017.

Now six months after Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by US air and artillery strikes, captured Raqqa from the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group following the ferocious battle and siege, Raqqa is a city still struggling to survive.

“Daesh sleeper cells and supporters still cause problems, but we have them contained,” says one young Kurdish fighter called Farman, as we talk in the dilapidated stairwell of an apartment block that stinks of raw sewerage and is still littered with spent cartridge cases in the heart of the city’s centre.

As well as being the self-proclaimed capital of IS’s caliphate, Raqqa was once home to about 400,000 people, many living in high-rise apartments. Today though the city is all but unrecognisable even to those who know it well and have returned from across Syria to try and rebuild their lives.

For many gone are their houses, while the hospitals, bridges, schools and factories they once used or worked in have been laid waste. For those brave and determined enough to return, there is virtually no electricity and little clean water. Only a few days ago as I journeyed across the city a heavy downpour left many streets flooded with up to six inches of filthy water in which floated the uncollected refuse that lies in heaps everywhere.

If these insanitary conditions pose a serious health hazard, so too does the countless Improvised Explosive Devices (IED’S), booby traps and the human remains that still lie among the rubble. In the city’s most devastated areas it’s not uncommon for the cloying sickly odour of decomposing corpses to drift in the wind and it is often the only sign for returning families that they have taken up residence next to a mass grave.

“It makes me so angry, the waste of human life the terrible destruction of the place in which we once lived,” says Mahmoud Jassm, the thirty year old leader of a team of firemen and first responders who are tasked with the grisly and dangerous job of unearthing the remains of Raqqa’s dead. It’s a far cry from Jassm’s previous role as PHD student studying Arabic language and literature.

“Men, women, children, mostly civilians but many Daesh fighters too we find in the graves and rubble,” Jassm tells me using the commonly adopted Arabic acronym for IS.

As we talk standing in the centre of a shattered public square surrounded by ruined buildings, he points to the body bags lying on the ground before us surrounded by swarms of flies. The smell is appalling but the firemen are only kitted out in cotton face masks and surgical gloves. Such is the shortage of supplies in Raqqa that even the body bags are recycled.

“This is a young women we just found, she can be no more than twenty-five,” he says gesturing towards one bag, as his colleagues continue digging in the hole behind us from which the remains of two other corpses have already been uncovered wrapped in blankets.

Across the city every day other teams of firemen are doing the same job. Anywhere on average between a dozen to thirty corpses and their remains are collected daily sometimes more when a mass grave is discovered.

“It’s terrible work, and very dangerous, the teams find unexploded bombs regularly,” says Dr Mahmood Ibraheem a former GP who has now been thrust into the role of a forensic specialist given that none remain in the city.

“There is serious shortage of all kinds of doctors and medical specialists,” he tells me, as we watch the firemen stumble thorough the rubble of another building.

“I have to do this job now, there’s no one else and we must record some of the details of those remains we find even if we cannot identify the victims,” Dr Ibraheem insists.

What has happened in Raqqa is of course being repeated time and again in other places across Syria daily.

Not surprisingly those still trying to survive in Raqqa feel they are already being forgotten about.

Currently the US-backed Kurdish authorities who control Raqqa are now focused on an escalating conflict with Turkey along Syria’s northern border.

Just as many civilians were forced to flee Raqqa, so now many have recently been uprooted from the city of Afrin after it was overrun by Turkish forces and their Syrian militia allies, the ranks of which are said by some observers to contain jihadists not that far removed ideologically from IS. “Our family’s ancestors have been living in Afrin for over 200 years,” says Nuri Urik a 45 year old Kurd who along with his family and thousands of others were forced from the city by the fighting.

Today he and his wife along with their children and grandchildren have taken up home in the Kurdish controlled city of Kobani the house they live in donated by a selfless local man they have never actually met.

“The whole journey was traumatic with the constant bombing, but the moment that we left Afrin was the worst, nobody remained in the village everyone left, “ he recalled of that day just a few months ago. During the journey his daughter in law was pregnant giving birth once in Kobani to his granddaughter Xedice who is now just one week old.

He says he has no idea when or even if the family will ever be able to return to Afrin, and for now like so many ordinary Syrians they remain uprooted. From Raqqa to Afrin and beyond this is a country where the future for so many is still unpredictable.

“Here in Raqqa it will take years for anything remotely resembling normality,” Dr Ibraheem says, while still standing in the city’s ruins. “For now it’s all about surviving and getting by,” he adds with a shrug of resignation.