Reaction Splits Between Celebration and Doubt
DAMASCUS,— Ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad received a death sentence from a Damascus court on Tuesday, with the ruling issued in his absence following convictions on charges including murder, torture and unlawful imprisonment spanning nearly 14 years of civil war.
This marked the first time Syrian courts had convicted Assad since Islamist rebel forces pushed him from office in December 2024, bringing an end to more than five decades of family rule and a war that killed hundreds of thousands.
News of the sentence sent crowds streaming toward the courthouse, where people clapped, chanted and waved Syrian flags in celebration.
Nearly two years earlier, Assad had fled the capital as opposition fighters closed in, eventually settling in Russia, where he and his family were given asylum on humanitarian grounds.
Presiding over Tuesday’s case against former regime officials, the judge sentenced the ex-president to death on findings of premeditated murder, including the killing of children, alongside torture, arbitrary detention and crimes against humanity.
Maher al-Assad, the former leader’s brother and commander of the Fourth Armored Division, received the identical sentence despite not appearing before the court.
His division had been accused of crushing protests, seizing back territory for the government and running a drug trafficking network that profited Assad.
Atef Najib, who once served as a security official in Deraa province, also received a death sentence. Deraa was where anti-Assad demonstrations first broke out in 2011.
Najib, a relative of the Assad family, had been captured by Syrian forces in early 2025 and was the lone defendant to stand trial in person.
Deraa residents held their own gathering, displaying photos of relatives who had died or been detained during the conflict.
Among them was Hamza al-Khatib, a boy of 13 whom activists say was seized, tortured and killed by government security forces.
Among those attending the sentencing was prosecutor Noha al-Masri, whose brother was killed in a 2011 crackdown on protesters in Deraa.
Speaking to Reuters, she said the verdict reflected the enormous scale of sacrifice made by Syrians across 15 years and the pain carried by families of the dead.
Nearly four months of trial proceedings led up to the ruling, which Syria’s Islamist-led government has pointed to as evidence of its commitment to pursuing transitional justice after Assad’s fall.
Not everyone welcomed the outcome, however. Anwar al-Bunni, who directs the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research, warned that the death sentence could complicate future efforts to bring Assad back to Syria, since most nations decline to extradite suspects to countries carrying out executions.
He told Reuters the ruling amounted to performative justice rather than a real step toward accountability.
Assad was born in 1965 and rose to the presidency in 2000 following the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad.
Throughout his rule, he preserved his family’s dominance and that of the Alawite minority within a country where Sunni Muslims make up the majority population, while keeping Syria firmly allied with Russia and Iran and opposed to both Israel and the United States.
His early years in power were shaped by the Iraq war and Syria’s military footprint in Lebanon.
The conflict that would define his presidency began after the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians calling for democratic change were met with lethal force from state security services.
U.S. President Donald Trump referred to Assad as an “animal” in 2018 over claims he had used chemical weapons, allegations Assad denied.
He clung to power well beyond what many expected, even as rebel groups seized large portions of Syrian territory in the war’s opening years.
That changed in 2024, when forces under now-President Ahmed al-Sharaa overran the country in an offensive that took less than two weeks.
Assad also remains wanted in France under an arrest warrant connected to a 2012 bombing at a press center in Homs.
(With files from Reuters)
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