One image of destruction in Palmyra has captured the global attention in 2015. It was an image that captured the blowing up of Temple of Baalshamin by ISIS. Since then, scholars, journalists and museums curators amongst many others, have been focused on this moment of destruction as if it the only time a site has been destroyed - as if it is the only site. However, little has been done to date on understanding the impact of destruction of everyday spaces, and the damage caused to people who lose the sense of belonging. What is more, rarely this destruction has been analysed through the lens of time. In this presentation, therefore, I ask, how do we make sense of long-term conflicts that radically reshape cities through slow violence manifesting itself visibly and invisibly in cities? How can we convert the one-off traumatic rupture of urban systems and its cinematic image of destruction, as in the case of Palmyra, into an understanding of slow and fast violence that takes place in cities across time? To answer these questions, I look at the city of Homs, which has been transformed by radical destruction to its social, cultural and urban environments. For over a decade now, violence, through destruction, injustices, and displacement, has accumulated in Homs slowly and repeatedly before fast violence took place in more extreme forms, creating and sustaining urban chronic traumas. Even after battlefields ended in Homs, everyday urban life has turned into slow moving and long in the making struggle. I build in this paper on Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence. Through this concept, I search for different sites and spaces in Homs that have been the locus of urban struggle, violence and trauma which have damaged the sense of belonging to many in Homs. Based on a series of interviews with residents who remain in Homs, I discuss the temporal and place-based effects of war in urban settings through the individual and collective slow suffering in cities. I also show how after the Palmyra moment that has been captured globally, everyday life becomes a war in itself not only for losing the cultural heritage sites, but for losing a sense of belonging and a sense of home.