After 13 years of war that began with street protests during the heady days of the Arab Spring and morphed into one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the Middle East’s recent history, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian strongman, collapsed in just over a week.
Sunni rebels – some of them former jihadists – who had broken out of the north-west province of Idlib swept into the capital Damascus after overrunning the major cities of Aleppo, Homs and Hama on their way south.
On the road into the city witnesses described seeing uniforms, military equipment and even tanks abandoned by the Syrian Army. On the country’s borders, queues began forming of displaced families desperate to return home after more than a decade as refugees.
In Damascus’s Umayyad Square, young men clambered onto tanks, shot in the air with automatic weapons, danced and took selfies. Many spoke of a moment of hope.
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