Hello and welcome to News Hour, coming to you live from London from the BBC World Service.
I'm Sean Laird, good to have you company.
Over the last couple of days,
we've been reporting events at the annual UN General Assembly in New York.
It's been notable thus far for the policy shift made by a number of Israel's allies in recognising a Palestinian state,
albeit a theoretical one, and for the speech by the US President Donald Trump,
which broke plenty of diplomatic conventions.
Perhaps the most remarkable UN debut is the one made on Wednesday afternoon by Ahmed Alshara,
the Syrian jihadi leader who brought an end to the house of Assad,
the hereditary autocracy that had ruled Syria since the 1960s.
Twenty years ago, Alshara was a devotee of al-Qaeda detained in an Iraqi prison.
As a leader of Islamist militants,
the US government at one point put a bounty of $10 million on his head.
Last December,
Al-Sharah's fighters marched on Damascus as Bashar al-Assad fled and his regime melted away.
Since then, he's met President Trump and is negotiating with Israel,
which for decades regarded Syria as a pariah.
This afternoon,
Mr Al-Sharah became the first Syrian leader to address the United Nations since 1967.
I come to you from Damascus, the capital of history and the cradle of civilizations,