Hello and welcome to NewsHour.
It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London.
I'm Tim Franks.
We're beginning with an invitation to picture a scene that might seem all too unremarkable,
ahead of state, wearing suit and tie, going to the White House to shake hands with the president.
But this has been an utterly remarkable moment, head-scratchingly so.
The head of state, in question,
is a man whom the US once designated as a global terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head.
He's now known as Ahmed Alshara.
Back then, his non-degue was Abu Muhammad al-Jilani,
the leader of an al-Qaeda-affiliated group of jihadists.
Last December, the forces he'd led,
which he had since distanced from al-Qaeda, but nonetheless remained militant Islamists,
helped overthrow the decades-long dictatorship of the Assad family and end the civil war,
which had racked Syria for 13 years.
Donald Trump, newly back in office,
quickly decided that President al-Sharah was a man worth doing business with,
especially now that Iran's influence in Syria had been beaten back by Assad's fall.
Well, in the last few minutes,
President Trump has been asked in the Oval Office by journalists about the meeting,