Syria's Assad: From power to death sentence

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Bashar al-Assad's 24-year rule over Syria ended in December 2024 with his fleeing to Moscow after a rebel offensive amid distracted allies. A Damascus court sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes including chemical attacks during the civil war rooted in the 2011 Arab Spring protests.

Damascus: Bashar al-Assad's 24-year rule of Syria ended abruptly in December 2024 following a lightning advance by rebel forces who struck while the Russian and Iranian allies who had backed him through years of civil war were distracted by conflicts elsewhere.He fled to Moscow, ending more than ​five decades of iron-fisted rule by his family and opening a new chapter for Syria.The historic shift was ​underscored on Tuesday when a Damascus court sentenced him to death in his absence for crimes including killings, arbitrary arrests and torture during the years in which he clung to power.Assad became president in ​2000 after the death of his father, Hafez.Shaped in its early years by the Iraq war and crisis in Lebanon, Assad's rule was defined by the civil war, which spiralled out of the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets, to be met with deadly force.Assad turned the full power of the Syrian military against his opponents as he sought to crush the rebellion inspired by the Arab Spring movement that had toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia.Inquiries by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations concluded that government forces under Assad used the nerve agent sarin and chlorine as a weapon ‌in attacks during the civil war on ⁠rebel-held areas.Following one ⁠poison gas attack in 2018, then-U.S. President Donald Trump declared Assad an "animal". Authorities denied using chemical weapons, which killed and injured thousands during the war.His ruthless approach to fighting rebels, including siege warfare tactics condemned as "medieval" by U.N. investigators, drew comparisons with the way his father had defeated Islamist insurgents in the 1980s.Justifying his response, Assad compared himself to a surgeon ​cutting into a wound. "Do we say to him: 'your hands are covered in blood?' Or do we thank him for saving the patient?" he said in parliament in 2012.Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the war, cities were flattened, and more than a quarter of the population fled abroad.A ​CRUMBLING ARMYHis grip on power appeared to be slipping in the first years of the war, as much of Syria fell to insurgents, some of them backed by Turkey, Gulf Arab states and the United States.Shi'ite militias backed by his ally Iran began arriving in 2012 to fight on his side, shoring up his hold on Damascus. The arrival of Russia's air force in 2015 allowed Assad to go on the offensive and claw back the bulk of the country.He outlasted many of the foreign leaders who believed his demise was imminent in the early days of ​the conflict.But reliant on Moscow and Tehran for military support and with parts of Syria still beyond his grasp, Assad's rule remained precarious. In late 2024, insurgents seized a moment of ⁠opportunity, attacking when ‌Iran had been weakened by conflict with Israel and Russia was distracted by its war in Ukraine.Syria's demoralised army crumbled as rebels led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa's Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group swept towards Damascus. Assad left the ​capital, first to a Russian airbase in Latakia, ​before being evacuated to Moscow on December 8, 2024.'STATE-RUN MACHINERY OF DEATH'Prisoners freed from Syria's notorious jails recounted the torture and abuse they'd endured. An international war crimes prosecutor, visiting Syria after Assad was toppled, said ⁠evidence emerging from mass grave sites exposed a "state-run machinery of death". He accused the Assad-led state of having conducted organised killing comparable to Nazi Germany.In ​October 2025, Reuters revealed that the Assad government had secretly moved thousands of bodies to a site in the desert east of Damascus, to hide evidence of atrocities.From the start, Assad ​described the conflict as an international conspiracy against a country that had stood in opposition to the United States and its Middle Eastern allies, especially Israel. He characterised the rebels as foreign-backed Islamist extremists who would have been easily defeated were it not for their supporters overseas. He dismissed the idea that there was such a thing as a moderate Syrian opposition.After Sharaa, a former al Qaeda commander, seized power in Damascus, Assad issued a written statement saying that "the state had fallen into the hands of terrorism".BARREL BOMBSAssad hailed from Syria's Alawite minority, a group which follows a religion that is an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam and had historically been based in Syria's coastal region.Along with the presidency, he also inherited the leadership of the Syrian branch of the Baath Party, an Arab nationalist movement established in the 1940s.Assad publicly held fast to the idea of Syria as a bastion of secular Arab nationalism even as the conflict appeared ever more sectarian, pitting his Alawite-led state and its Shi'ite backer Iran against insurgents drawn from the Sunni Muslim majority and supported by Sunni-led states.The use of chemical weapons against re