Bashar al-Assad

• 1. Introduction

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  Bashar al-Assad was slipping out of Damascus on the morning of the 8th of December 2024 when his longtime driver asked him a question. According to accounts of his final hours, the driver said, "You're really leaving us?" Assad replied, "What about you people? Aren't you going to fight?" Observers have pointed to that exchange as a sign of how detached he had become from the people around him.

  The man in that car had governed Syria since 2000. His family had held power for 54 years. Yet he was never meant to be the one at the wheel.

  How did a soft-spoken doctor become the head of a police state? Why did early hopes of reform fade within a single year? What turned street protests in 2011 into a war that drew in Iran and Russia? And what finally happened when the army and the allies stopped holding the line?

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• 2. The Reluctant Heir

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  In 1988, Bashar al-Assad finished medical school and began work as an army doctor at Tishrin Military Hospital, on the outskirts of Damascus. He had been born in Damascus on the 11th of September 1965, the second son and third child of Anisa Makhlouf and Hafez al-Assad. The surname means "the lion." His grandfather Ali had adopted it in 1927, replacing al-Wahsh, which means "the Savage," as the family climbed from peasant status to minor notability.

  Among the Assad children, Bashar stood apart. His brothers Bassel and Maher were drawn to politics or the military. Bashar was quiet, reserved and uninterested in either. A university friend remembered him as timid, avoiding eye contact and speaking in a low voice. The children rarely saw their father, and Bashar later said he entered his father's office only once while he was president.

  Four years after graduating, he moved to London to begin postgraduate training in ophthalmology at Western Eye Hospital. Colleagues there described him as a "geeky I.T. guy."

  Then, in 1994, his elder brother Bassel died in a car accident. Bassel had been the son Hafez was grooming for the presidency. Bashar was recalled to the Syrian Army, and state propaganda soon began calling him "the hope of the masses." Over the next six and a half years, General Bahjat Suleiman, an officer in the Defense Companies, oversaw the transition on three levels. The first was building support in the military and security apparatus. The second was shaping Bashar's public image. The third was teaching him how the country was run.

  He entered the military academy at Homs in 1994 and became a colonel in the elite Republican Guard in January 1999. Along the way, older divisional commanders were pushed into retirement, and young Alawite officers loyal to Bashar took their places.

  In 1998 he took over Syria's Lebanon file, which Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam had handled since the 1970s. Khaddam had been a potential contender for the presidency, and the move sidelined him. Bashar then installed his ally Emile Lahoud as Lebanon's president and left former prime minister Rafic Hariri without his political backing. He also replaced the long-serving Syrian High Commissioner in Lebanon, Ghazi Kanaan, with Rustum Ghazaleh.

  At home, he led a bureau that received citizens' complaints and ran an anti-corruption campaign. Many of his potential rivals for the presidency ended up on trial for corruption. He also became president of the Syrian Computer Society and helped bring the internet to Syria, which fed his image as a modernizer.

  Hafez al-Assad died on the 10th of June 2000. The rules of the presidency itself were about to be rewritten.

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• 3. Spring Then Winter

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  The Syrian constitution was amended after Hafez's death, lowering the minimum age for a president from 40 to 34. That happened to be Bashar's age. He was the sole candidate in the referendum and was confirmed on the 10th of July 2000 with 97.29 percent support. On the 17th of July he became president, and he also took the posts of commander-in-chief and regional secretary of the Ba'ath Party.

  Immediately after he took office, a reform movement called the Damascus Spring made cautious advances. Writers, intellectuals, dissidents and cultural activists drove it. Mezzeh prison was closed, and a wide-ranging amnesty freed hundreds of political prisoners linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

  The thaw did not last the year. Security crackdowns resumed, and the Damascus Spring turned into the Damascus Winter. Hundreds of intellectuals were arrested, exiled or imprisoned. The state of emergency stayed in force, and the movement was banned under the pretext of "national unity and stability." Discussion forums were shut down, and many intellectuals were abducted by the Mukhabarat, tortured and killed. Many analysts believe the early openness was a strategy to find the Syrians who did not support the new leadership.

  In October 2001, British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Damascus. At the joint press conference, Assad condemned the United States invasion of Afghanistan and spoke of "the killing of innocent civilians." He also praised Palestinian militant groups as "freedom fighters." British officials later said his private views were more conciliatory. In their account, he criticized the September 11 attacks and accepted the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

  Behind the public rhetoric, Syria proved useful to Washington. After September 11, it emerged as one of the CIA's most effective intelligence allies against al-Qaeda, and the quality and quantity of its information exceeded the agency's expectations. Syrian prisons became a major site of extraordinary rendition, where alleged al-Qaeda members were tortured by Syrian interrogators on behalf of the CIA. A 2013 report by the Open Society Foundations listed Syria among the most common destinations for rendered suspects.

  Elections offered no more suspense than that first referendum. On the 27th of May 2007, Assad won another seven-year term with 97.6 percent of the vote, as the only candidate. The state officially called these votes "renewing the pledge of allegiance" to the Assads, and voting was enforced as a compulsory duty. Independent observers regarded the elections as a sham. By 2021 the winning share was 95.2 percent, and only 38 percent of Syrians were able to take part.

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• 4. Lebanon Rises

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  On the 14th of February 2005, a truck bomb exploded in Beirut and killed 22 people, among them the former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri. The Christian Science Monitor reported that Syria was widely blamed. In the months before, relations between Hariri and Assad had plummeted amid threats and intimidation. Immediately after the bombing, Assad promoted his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, a key suspect in the plot, to head Syrian Military Intelligence.

  The streets of Lebanon answered. Hundreds of thousands of protesters demanded that Syrian forces leave completely. Under mounting pressure to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1559, Assad declared on the 5th of March that he would order his soldiers out. On the 14th of March, more than a million Lebanese marched in Beirut, Muslims, Christians and Druze together, a month to the day after Hariri's death.

  Resolution 1595, adopted on the 7th of April, sent an international commission to investigate the murder. By the 5th of May, the United Nations confirmed that every Syrian soldier had left, ending a 29-year occupation. The uprising became known as Lebanon's "independence intifada" or the Cedar Revolution.

  The commission's report, published on the 20th of October 2005, found that high-ranking members of Syrian intelligence and the Assad family had directly supervised the killing. The Mehlis report singled out Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleiman and Jamil Al Sayyed. In December 2005 the BBC reported that Damascus strongly denied any involvement.

  Syria's ambitions in the 2000s reached further than Lebanon. With help from North Korea, it began a covert nuclear programme. In September 2007, the Israeli Air Force destroyed the suspected reactor in an operation called Operation Outside the Box.

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• 5. Machinery of Fear

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  Estimates of Mukhabarat strength put the ratio of secret police agents to civilians as high as 1 to 158. Across its various branches, the security apparatus shut down civil society organizations, restricted movement within the country and banned non-Ba'athist political literature and symbols. Agents carried out routine abductions, arbitrary detentions and torture throughout the 2000s.

  In 2010, Human Rights Watch published a report titled "A Wasted Decade." It documented arbitrary arrests, censorship and discrimination against Syrian Kurds during Assad's first ten years. Members of the General Intelligence Directorate already enjoyed immunity from criminal prosecution, and in 2008 Assad extended that immunity to other branches of the security forces. Some 600 Lebanese political prisoners were thought to be held in Syrian prisons, a few for more than 30 years. From 2006, travel bans against dissidents were used more widely.

  In a 2007 interview with ABC News, Assad said, "We don't have such things as political prisoners." That December, The New York Times reported the arrest of 30 dissidents who were organizing a joint opposition front. Three of them, considered opposition leaders, were remanded in custody.

  On the 22nd of September 2001, Assad decreed a Press Law that tightened state control over everything printed in Syria, from newspapers to pamphlets. A 2007 law required internet cafes to record every comment users posted on chat forums. A 2008 decree made them keep customer records and report them routinely to the police. YouTube and Facebook were blocked intermittently between 2008 and February 2011. The Committee to Protect Journalists ranked Syria the third most dangerous country for online bloggers in 2009 and the third most censored country in 2012.

  The Kurdish minority bore some of the heaviest pressure. More than 300,000 Syrian Kurds were rendered stateless, and Kurdish was banned in schools and public institutions. In 2004, a Kurdish uprising in Qamishli was crushed by the military. More than 36 Kurds were killed and at least 160 demonstrators were injured. More than 2,000 civilians were arrested and tortured in detention. Between 2005 and 2010, Human Rights Watch verified crackdowns on at least 14 Kurdish political and cultural gatherings. In March 2008, soldiers fired on a Nowruz gathering in Qamishli, killing three people and injuring five.

  The army itself was built on sect as much as skill. Conscripts and lower ranks were overwhelmingly non-Alawite, but the senior ranks were filled with Alawite loyalists. Elite units such as the Tiger Forces, the Republican Guard and the 4th Armoured Division were mostly Alawite. Sunni officers were watched by the secret police, and most were given Alawite assistants to monitor their movements.

  Between 2011 and 2013, that apparatus tortured and killed more than 10,000 activists, dissidents, journalists and civil defense volunteers.

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• 6. A Family Business

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  In 2011, Syria ranked 129th in the Corruption Perceptions Index. Patronage networks of Ba'ath elites and Alawite loyalists had dominated the economy since the 1970s, resting on kinship and nepotism.

  Assad's economic liberalization in the 2000s, which the regime called a "social market economy," became a symbol of that corruption. Alawite loyalists seized a large share of the privatized sectors and business assets. His cousin Rami Makhlouf was the regime's most favored oligarch. Small businesses were handicapped, and private entrepreneurship suffered. The programme alienated the rural population, urban working classes, businessmen and industrialists.

  Assad also reshaped the circle around him. Many figures from his father's regime resigned or were purged, and their places went to loyalists from Alawite clans. Observers describe the strategy as "authoritarian upgrading." The government called itself secular, yet political scientists noted that it exploited sectarian tensions. Loyalist figure Michel Samaha urged sectarian mobilization against what he called the "sea of Sunnis." A Homs urbanization scheme in the 2000s expelled thousands of Sunni residents while Alawite-majority areas were left intact.

  The war deepened the pattern. In 2019, confiscation campaigns moved major economic assets to the presidential couple. Asma al-Assad rose to head a clandestine economic council and was thought to have become "a central funnel of economic power in Syria." Her Syria Trust organization vetted foreign aid, because the government authorized UN agencies only if they worked under state bodies. Maher al-Assad grew wealthy overseeing the state-sponsored captagon drug industry. The couple was said to own vast swathes of Syria's shipping, real estate, telecommunications and banking sectors.

  By 2022, Syria ranked second worst in the world in the Corruption Perceptions Index. When the 2011 revolution erupted, its fiercest protests broke out in the working-class neighborhoods that had paid the highest price for this system.

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• 7. The War and Its Toll

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  Protests in Syria began on the 26th of January 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring, with demands for political reform and an end to the state of emergency in place since 1963. A planned "day of rage" on the 4th and the 5th of February passed uneventfully. Then on the 18th and the 19th of March came the largest demonstrations in decades, and the authorities answered with violence.

  On the 30th of March 2011, Assad gave his first public response. He blamed "conspiracies" and described protesters as "germs." Sanctions followed. Barack Obama signed an executive order on the 18th of May 2011 targeting Assad and six other senior officials. On the 23rd of May, EU foreign ministers added Assad and nine others to a travel ban and asset freeze list. In July, Hillary Clinton said Assad had "lost legitimacy," and on the 18th of August Obama urged him to "step aside." That same month, the cartoonist Ali Farzat, who had drawn Assad, was attacked and hospitalized with fractures in both hands.

  By the end of January 2012, Reuters reported that more than 5,000 civilians and protesters had been killed by the army, security agents and militia. On the 15th of July 2012, the International Committee of the Red Cross declared Syria to be in a state of civil war, with the death toll nearing 20,000. That month the Arab League demanded Assad's swift resignation and promised him a safe exit. He refused, and turned to Iran and Russia. Iran launched a military intervention in 2013. Russia had been vetoing Western-sponsored Security Council drafts since October 2011.

  By 2014 the regime's own base was cracking. After four military bases fell in the Raqqa Governorate in September, Assad's cousin Douraid al-Assad demanded the defense minister's resignation. Another cousin, Hafez Makhlouf, was dismissed from his security post and exiled to Belarus. On the 14th of March 2015, Mohammed Toufic al-Assad, an influential cousin who had founded the shabiha militias, was shot five times in the head in a dispute over influence in Qardaha. A figure close to Assad said in late 2014, "I don't see the current situation as sustainable... I think Damascus will collapse at some point."

  Russia rescued him. On the 30th of September 2015, at Syria's formal request, Russia began direct military intervention. Vladimir Putin described the aim as "stabilising the legitimate power in Syria." The intervention gave Moscow control of Syrian airspace and naval bases with permanent reach across the Eastern Mediterranean. In December 2016, government forces retook half of rebel-held Aleppo, ending a six-year stalemate. Assad celebrated the "liberation" of the city. By 2021 his regime controlled most of the country.

  The weapons used drew condemnation. In a February 2015 BBC interview, Assad dismissed accusations of barrel bombs as "childish." BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen later called the claim "patently not true." After the 2017 Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, Assad called it a "100 percent fabrication." Chemical weapons inspectors from the OPCW found that the regime was responsible. In December 2013, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay had already said UN investigations directly implicated Assad in crimes against humanity.

  The UN estimates at least 306,000 civilian deaths between 2011 and 2021, and over 600,000 people were killed between 2011 and 2024. Pro-Assad forces caused more than 90 percent of civilian casualties. About 14 million Syrians were displaced, including around 7.2 million refugees. UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi called it "the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time." A 2024 report by the Syrian Investigative Journalism Unit estimated that more than 6,000 detainees under 18 were sentenced to death at Sednaya Prison and a military field court in Al-Dimas between 2014 and 2017.

  Justice has been slow. In 2014, U.S. war crimes envoy Stephen Rapp said the crimes were the worst since Nazi Germany. A year later he said the case against Assad was "much better" than those against Slobodan Milosevic or Charles Taylor. Syria is not a party to the Rome Statute, so the International Criminal Court needs Security Council authorization, which Russia consistently vetoes. In 2023, Canada and the Netherlands filed a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing Syria of violating the UN Convention Against Torture.

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• 8. Collapse and Exile

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  In February 2022, Syria was one of five countries that opposed the UN General Assembly resolution denouncing Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A day after the invasion, Assad praised it in a phone call with Putin as "a correction of history." By June 2022, Syria had become the first country after Russia to recognize the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. On the 12th anniversary of the Syrian protests, Assad met Putin in Russia and defended what Moscow called its "special military operation."

  At the same time, his neighbors began to thaw. In March 2023, he visited the United Arab Emirates. In May 2023, he was welcomed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Arab League summit in Jeddah. In September 2023, he met Xi Jinping in Hangzhou, and the two announced a China-Syria strategic partnership. Turkish President Erdogan expressed readiness to meet him in July 2023, but Assad insisted on full Turkish withdrawal from northern Syria.

  The end came quickly. On the 27th of November 2024, a coalition of rebels launched offensives, and the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham took control of Aleppo. Airstrikes on Idlib that followed killed at least 25 people, according to the White Helmets. The rebels captured Hama on the 5th of December. Nearly 50,000 people fled the area, and over 600 casualties were reported, including 104 civilians. On the 6th of December, rebels began encircling Damascus. On the 7th, they took Homs, cutting the capital off from the coastal regime strongholds.

  In his final hours, Assad reportedly left the capital after Russian officials showed him footage of his forces collapsing. He took only a few aides and his son Hafez, leaving others behind. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov worked to facilitate his departure. He went first to the Russian-operated Khmeimim Air Base near Latakia, then on to Moscow, where Russia granted him asylum "on humanitarian grounds." On the 16th of December, a statement attributed to him claimed he had gone to the Latakia base "to oversee combat operations" and had been evacuated by Russia.

  In Moscow, a Russian ambassador said in April 2025 that his stay was conditional on staying out of media and politics. Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa said his officials had asked Russia to extradite Assad, and Russia refused. On the 20th of September 2025, Assad was hospitalized in critical condition and discharged nine days later. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights alleged poisoning, and Lavrov denied it. Die Zeit reported that he lived in a luxury skyscraper apartment and spent much of his time playing online games. The Guardian reported that he was studying Russian and taking ophthalmology lessons.

  The legal net is closing in other places. In 2025, France issued three arrest warrants over a 2017 bombing in Daraa, the killing of journalists Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik in Homs in 2012, and the Ghouta chemical attacks of 2013. In September 2025, a Syrian court issued its own warrant citing "premeditated murder" and "torture leading to death," paving the way for circulation through Interpol.

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