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Taken by photographer Valery Sharifulin in the Dahaniya neighborhood of the Syrian capital, children can be seen flying a makeshift kite amid the bombed out shells of buildings.
Despite the devastation, women hang their washing in a backyard with walls pockmarked by bullets and children collect timber for fires.
But while everyday life goes on, the threat to civilians remains - another of the images shows a Syrian serviceman at a security point surrounded by sandbags.
Damascus remains under the control of forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, but ISIS and an assortment of other rebel and jihadi groups have the capital in their cross-hairs
The city was ranked bottom among the 140 cities surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit for its 2015 Global Liveability Ranking, with the city's infrastructure ravaged by civil war and aerial assaults from al-Assad's Syrian Air Force.