Jubayr spent a month in Damascus, lodging in the Dar al-Hadith ("house of religious tradition") just west of the great Umayyad mosque. This institution no longer exists and in fact much of the ...

View outside Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Since Sharaa's Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group swept Bashar al-Assad from power, its bureaucrats - who until last week were running an Islamist administration ...

“Bashar al-Assad spread sectarianism, and today our country belongs to us all,” he told followers at the Umayyad Mosque in central Damascus.