A year ago, the war that President Bashar al-Assad seemed to have won was turned upside down.
A rebel force had broken out of Idlib, a Syrian province on the border with Turkey, and was storming towards Damascus. It was led by a man known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, and his militia group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
Jolani was a nom-de-guerre, reflecting his family's roots in the Golan Heights, Syria's southern highlands, annexed by Israel after it was occupied in 1967. His real name is Ahmed al-Sharaa.
One year later, he is interim president, and Bashar al-Assad is in a gilded exile in Russia.
Syria is still in ruins. In every city and village I have visited this last 10 days, people were living in skeletal buildings gutted by war. But for all the new Syria's problems, it feels much lighter without the crushing, cruel weight of the Assads.
Sharaa has found the going easier abroad than at home. He has won the argument with Saudi Arabia and the West that he is Syria's best chance of a stable future.
In May, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia arranged a brief meeting between Sharaa and US President Donald Trump. Afterwards, Trump called him a 'young attractive tough guy'.
At home, Syrians know his weaknesses and the problems Syria faces better than foreigners. Sharaa's writ does not run in the north-east, where the Kurds are in control, or parts of the south where Syrian Druze, another minority sect, want a separate state backed by their Israeli allies.
On the coast, Alawites – Assad's sect – fear a repeat of the massacres they suffered in March.
A year ago, the new masters of Damascus, like most of the armed rebels in Syria, were Sunni Islamists. Sharaa, their leader, had a long history fighting for al-Qaeda in Iraq, where he had been imprisoned by the Americans, and then was a senior commander with the group that became Islamic State.
Later, as he built his power base in Syria, he broke with and fought both IS and al-Qaeda. People who had travelled to Idlib to see him said that he had developed a much more pragmatic set of beliefs, better suited to governing Syria, with its spectrum of religious sects.
Sunnis are the majority. As well as Kurds and Druze, there are Christians, many of whom find it hard to forget Sharaa's jihadist past.
In December of the previous year, it seemed hard to believe that the HTS offensive was moving so fast. It took them three days to capture Aleppo, Syria's northern powerhouse.
After initial turbulence, Sharaa's government made significant progress toward normalization. The suspension of punitive sanctions has allowed some economic activities to resume, and international diplomacy is becoming viable once more.
Nonetheless, the path ahead remains fraught with challenges. As sectarian tensions reignite, and external threats emerge, the prospect of renewed violence looms large. People express fears about their security, revealing a sentiment that echoes throughout the nation: 'We go to sleep and wake up afraid.'
