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Hello and welcome to NewsHour.
It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London.
I'm Tim Franks.
Exactly this time a year ago, the barely imaginable happened.
Syria broke free from the Assads.
The dictatorship that had kept a country in its dead grip for more than five decades,
that dictatorship fell.
Bashar al-Assad and his family fled to Moscow as a band of rebels led by a one-time jihadist swept into Damascus.
Today, one year on from that revolution,
the centre of the capital resounded to an extended fireworks display.
The sound of pyrotechnics over Umayyad Square at the very heart of Damascus.
I mentioned that the band of rebels had been led by a one-time al-Qaeda-affiliated militant.
He was then known as Abu Muhammad al-Jalani.
The U.S.
still had a $10 million bounty on his head.
Jalani quickly shared his combat fatigues and his non-dagare and took to wearing suits and being known by his original name of Ahmed al-Sharah.
Today, as president of this new Syria,
he pledged a clean break from the Assad family's poisonous legacy.