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 ...

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 ...