The following is an excerpt of a piece written by Syria Deeply managing editor Karen Leigh and Nathaniel Rosenblatt, senior analyst for the Middle East and North Africa at Caerus Associates. To read the full post, go to War on the Rocks.

As Syria’s conflict enters its fourth year, nearly half of the country has been forcibly displaced. Today, Syrians are fleeing the city for the countryside, reversing more than 10 years of rapid urbanization in the country before the 2011 uprising. One official we spoke to from the Relief and Civil Defense Committee in the southern province of Deraa this spring emphasized that displaced persons no longer move to the city, but instead “migrate from village to village.”

This is due to the urbanization of Syria’s conflict, with government air raids intensely targeting its cities. The urban centers themselves are also divided, with control often split between the government and the rebels. Most refugees come from rebel-held urban areas, the target of near-daily aerial attacks that kill civilians and destroy basic municipal services.

At present, Syria’s de-urbanizing trend of displacement is bucking traditional flows, which usually see floods of rural migrants overwhelming urban areas. But this trend will only last as long as the conflict: Once Syria’s cities appear safe, they will become havens for the country’s most vulnerable populations seeking easier access to aid and publicly available services. Aleppo and Damascus once swelled with the ranks of recent urban migrants. These cities will grow even larger with the influx of those displaced by the conflict. This is a massive, vulnerable urban population in an unstable, divided state. If the US wants to develop measures to counter the growth of terrorist groups in the region—not just in neighboring countries, but in Syria—it must look closely at the hundreds of thousands of recently displaced persons expected to descend on Syria’s cities.

Homs is an example of what that repopulation might look like. Last month in the once-besieged city, government and local opposition officials reached a ceasefire agreement in which the last rebel soldiers were evacuated from the city center. The agreement led former residents to think fighting there was subsiding enough that it was safe to return.

“Our house is in the Hamidiyeh district of old Homs,” said one resident we interviewed who had fled two years earlier. “We went back to our neighborhood and were very nervous. We knew from pictures that buildings were destroyed and that our house [was included].” The resident estimated that over 90% of the houses in his neighborhood were at least partially destroyed. “Without exception,” he added, “all the houses had been opened and people had tampered with its property—smashing and stealing furniture and taking precious items.”