World

Joining us is Fuad Sayed Issa – a Syrian activist and founder of VIOLET, an organisation which supports human rights and refugees in Syria.

Two days after the collapse of the Assad regime, the new de facto government is slowly taking shape.

All over Europe, governments have started to consider whether Syrians could be returned home – just days after the fall of the Assad regime.

Bashar al-Assad has fled Damascus to Russia where Vladimir Putin is reportedly sheltering the former Syrian dictator – for those Syrians who have defied Assad’s brutal regime for years this is a moment of celebration and hope, but also fear.

Foreign Affairs correspondent Pariac O’Brien reached Damascus after travelling by road from the Lebanese border.

For the first time since Brexit, a UK chancellor was back in Brussels addressing her European Union counterparts.

Professor Mark Galeotti is an expert in modern Russia and Senior Associate Fellow at the defence and security thinktank, the Royal United Services Institute.

The fall of the Assad regime has led not only to convulsions in the states that neighbour Syria, it’s also causing major global power shifts.

We spoke to the White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby, and started by asking if the US is in touch with HTS, and whether it has any plans to remove the rebel group from the terror designation list

While US bombers were targeting ISIS targets in Syria, President Biden was saying the fall of the Assad regime presents an ‘opportunity’.

Sir Keir Starmer, on a tour of the Gulf, said Assad’s departure was an opportunity for the country, but has warned that the fall of other brutal regimes in the past had resulted in violence not peace. 

We spoke to Bissan al-Hallak, who lives in Damascus, and started by asking whether she was optimistic about the future of Syria.

After the fast moving events of the past week when rebels took major cities and gained control of Syria, today the extent of the brutality of the Assad regime was revealed by the liberation of a notorious prison in the capital, Damascus.

Thousands of Syrians displaced during the civil war, after enduring often long and perilous journeys, ended up settling here in the UK.

With Assad gone and the country in the hands of different groups of rebels, what now for the future of Syria?