A year ago, the fall of Bashar al-Assad was narrated as liberation. Syrians danced in Umayyad Square. The world’s cameras were rolling. Yet liberation, in the Middle East, has a habit of arriving with strings attached — and Syria’s strings, it turns out, were always going to be held by someone.

The question was never whether Syria would be free. It was who would define what that freedom meant, and at whose expense. Twelve months on, the answers are becoming uncomfortably clear.