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Hello and welcome to NewsHour.
It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in London.
I'm Tim Franks.
It has been a head spinning few days in Syria after the astonishing collapse of the House of Assad.
There's an equally dizzying array of questions which Syrians, not to mention the rest of us, need to confront.
Whether the country will submit to the chaos and instability that has subsumed other Arab countries whose rulers were toppled, or whether the promise of a more open, democratic government will vanish in the grip of another authoritarian leader.
On that front, there appear at least to be some initially encouraging noises from the main Islamist rebel group in Syria, Hayat Tahrir.
They say that they've granted an amnesty to all army conscripts and that they've had a meeting with the outgoing prime minister about a transfer of power to an interim figure, Mohammed Al Bashir.
While underlining, they say, the need to benefit from the experience of those who have been running the country in the even shorter term.
There's also the question about the country's network of notorious prisons where tens of thousands of political detainees disappeared under the detainee.
Under the dictatorship of the Assads, families have been streaming towards the jails in the hope of finding their relatives.
Now that the doors have been prized open, the most feared prison of them all was Sadnaya, near Damascus.
Our first report today is from there with our correspondent in Syria, Barbara pletosher.
I'm about 30 kilometers outside of Damascus by one of the main prison complexes.
It's called Said Naya and I can see two prisons in the distance on a hill.
The one to the right is the main prison.
There hts freed the inmates already.