When President Bashar Assad turns from the wreckage of Aleppo to assert his authority across a fractured Syria, it will be as a figure who is virtually unassailable by rebels, but still faces great challenges in restoring the power of his state.
The fall of Aleppo now means that rebels have almost no chance of ousting Assad, but their revolt has left him in hock to foreign allies, resigned to the loss of swaths of his country for the time being and with tough pockets of resistance still to crush.
"Certainly it is not the end of the war. ... But when you take Aleppo, you control 90 percent of the fertile areas of Syria, the regions that hold the cities and markets, the populated regions," said a senior pro-Damascus official in the region.