Syrians awakened on 9 December to a hopeful, if uncertain, future after rebels seized the capital Damascus and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, following 13 years of civil war and more than 50 years of his family’s brutal rule. The lightning advance of a militia alliance spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al Qaeda affiliate, was a generational turning point for the Middle East. It ends a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble, swathes of countryside depopulated and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions. Millions of refugees could finally go home from camps across Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan
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