Amid the rubble of Saraqib, some of the wall graffiti dating back to its time as a centre of the the 2011 Arab spring uprising remains. “The revolution will go on,” one reads. “Tomorrow the sun rises,” says another.
A week after the astonishing rout of Bashar al-Assad by rebel forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, this small town of concrete, red earth and olive groves in Syria’s north-west was a stop on the Guardian’s 280-mile (450km) journey along the M5, the highway threading all of the country’s major cities and six provinces together.
Suffering was palpable everywhere, from children rummaging through bins for food in Aleppo and Homs, to relatives searching for loved ones in Damascus’s prisons, to displaced people still living in tents in Idlib. There are huge challenges ahead for HTS’s transitional government, and in some places, sectarian violence has already re-emerged.
