Kalashnikov fire heralds the return to the promised land. In Muadamiyat al-Sham, on the outskirts of Damascus, you only have to listen for this welcome. A little at a time, rebel fighters return home to this town in the western Ghouta area, dotted with olive trees. After years of separation, families and neighbors welcome them with drums, mizmar – a kind of flute – and shrill cries from women who interrupt themselves to shout at the local youth to stop shooting in the air.

"I didn't recognize my own house," said Mahmoud al-Shalabi, holding a knife and ammunition magazines harnessed to his Syrian National Army uniform, one of the Turkish-backed rebel factions that took part in the victorious Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) offensive, precipitating the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

Like his hometown, Mahmoud al-Shalabi is not the same. At the start of the revolution, he was 25, worked as a butcher and had never seen death with his own eyes. Today, he has a long beard, a face streaked with wrinkles and his blue eyes show a heaviness after nine years of exile in the rebel enclave of Idlib, constantly shelled by the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies.

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