Walking around Khalidiyah in north-west Aleppo, every person in the street is affected by the continued terrorist attacks. Children wave shyly from the balconies, others hide behind the sniper sheets, others walk past glaring but return out of curiosity and to have their picture taken. Life goes in but the terrorist presence only a few hundred meters away hangs like a dark shroud, a shadow behind the eyes of the children who can be shot for crossing the street or their homes destroyed by mortars.

This short interview is so familiar – the same history of externally fuelled sectarianism and terror, the refusal to accept an ideology so far removed from Syria’s secular culture, the destruction and the determination to rebuild and to restore Syria, not to how it was before but better.