Until late last year, the United States had a US$10 million bounty on Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa. Now Syria’s transitional leader, al-Sharaa has just met US President Donald Trump, who praised him and pledged to lift sanctions on Damascus.

Today, Damascus-based correspondent, Heidi Pett, on meeting al-Sharaa in person, how he won an audience with Trump and what it means for Syria’s future.

Since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad, Syrians have been celebrating. But others are searching the massive network of prisons that underpinned Assad’s repressive regime, hoping to find out the fate of lost loved ones. Meanwhile, Syria’s new rulers, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, are grappling with how to control the infrastructure that underpinned Assad’s massive state-run drug trade.

Today, journalist Heidi Pett, on the ground in Damascus, as the Syrian people reckon with what the future holds for their country.

On a street in downtown Beirut there’s a five-storey building – a derelict hotel. It was empty for years, until recently, when hundreds of displaced people started arriving.

There has been a massive effort to help shelter the one million displaced Lebanese, but in this building and in many others they aren’t always welcome, with religious divides from the civil war still palpable decades on.