DAMASCUS: A criminal court in Damascus has sentenced ousted and exiled former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to death.
The former Syrian leader was sentenced to death in absentia by international news agencies and court proceedings. Another cousin of the Assad regime, Atef Najib, a high-ranking security official from the Assad era, was also sentenced to death by the Syrian court. Unlike Assad, Najib was in the courtroom when the ruling was made and stood inside the cage of the defendant wearing a standard prisoner’s outfit. Bashar al-Assad was sentenced to death for “premeditated murder, systematic torture, arbitrary detention and crimes against humanity” during the country’s long-running civil war, the court said. An ophthalmologist by profession, Bashar al-Assad was educated and trained in medicine in London and took over power after the death of his father Hafez al-Assad.
He was the ruler of Syria from July 2000 till December 2024. The Syrian government met demands for democracy with brutal military repression in 2011, during the “Arab Spring” of Middle Eastern revolts. The suppression quickly turned into a bloody, multi-faceted civil war. It is well documented that the Syrian civil war is one of the worst humanitarian crises of the modern century, with hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of injuries, and over half of the total population of Syria displaced. In December 2024, opposition forces waged a broad assault and took control of the capital, Damascus, effectively toppling Assad’s regime. Assad later went into exile in Russia, marking the end of his family’s over 50-year authoritarian rule over the country.