Sentenced to death in absentia the Syrian ex-dictator Bashar al-Assad
A criminal court in Damascus holds him responsible for crimes against humanity, along with eight other men from the regime, only one of whom remains detained in the country
A Syrian court on Tuesday sentenced former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to death for various crimes, including crimes against humanity, premeditated murder, and torture. This is the first public sentence in decades against the Syrian leader, who was overthrown in December 2024 and fled the country. The court had to limit itself to sentencing Al-Assad "to death in absentia," as he lives in exile in Moscow, under the protection of Vladimir Putin.
Judge Fakhr al-Din al-Uryan, of criminal court number 4 in Damascus, read the sentence and declared Bashar al-Assad guilty of the "serious crime of premeditated and intentional murder of more than one person and of children, as well as the serious crime of torture and arbitrary detention, and of committing crimes against humanity." In the sentence, the court also considered that "the criminal Bashar al-Assad's contribution to the crimes was that of the highest decision-maker [as] he mobilized state institutions to commit them," the judge ruled.
More than 570,000 dead and 1.5 million injured
The Syrian war left at least 570,000 dead and more than 1.5 million injured, according to estimates verified by UN agencies. The conflict, which lasted from 2011 to 2024, also caused millions of displaced people: 5.5 million Syrians remain as internally displaced, and another 3.6 million continue to be registered as refugees abroad. Even now, 15.6 million people require humanitarian assistance. Sednaya prison was the symbol of Al-Assad's repression. It was known by the nickname of the regime's "human slaughterhouse." Once it fell, the inspection of the facilities confirmed the inhumane conditions in which the inmates lived: torture and mass executions were common in that hell.
the inspection of the facilities confirmed the inhumane conditions in which the inmates lived: torture and mass executions were common in that hell.
On the other hand, the court has also sentenced to death eight more people linked to al-Assad's regime, including Al-Assad's brother, Maher al-Assad, and his cousin Atef Najib, who is the only one present at the hearing. In fact, the sentence is part of the hearing against this latter man, Atef Najib, cousin of the former dictator and former head of the Political Security branch in Daraa. Daraa is the Syrian city where the popular revolts began in 2011, leading to the war that lasted fourteen years.
Najib is being held in Syria. With the start of the revolts, he was sent to the north of the country and then went into hiding. He was missing from mid-2011 until he was captured in a security raid in the coastal town of Latakia on January 31, 2025. The rest of the condemned, with Bashar al-Assad at the forefront, are fugitives from justice.
Since fleeing Syria at the end of 2024, Bashar al-Assad's life in Russia has been shrouded in mystery. Only an investigation by the German newspaper Die Zeit shed some light on the new stage in the former dictator's biography. Among other things, it was learned that he lived in a luxury skyscraper in Moscow. The Russian secret services, the FSB, have him under surveillance day and night, and precisely this invisibility would be one of the conditions imposed by the Kremlin to guarantee his safety. It remains to be seen what consequences Bashar al-Assad's death sentence will have, a judicial staging that all indications suggest will have more political value than real effects.
New bilateral stage
Although Russia granted asylum to Bashar al-Assad after his flight, the new Syrian power has opted to maintain bridges with Moscow. President Ahmed al-Sharaa met with Vladimir Putin in the Russian capital on October 15, 2025, and for the second time on January 28, 2026, in talks where the future of Russian military bases in Syria occupied a central place.
This past Sunday, in fact, the Syrian Foreign Minister announced the future of the two main Russian military bases on the Mediterranean coast, in what Damascus considers a decisive step towards a "new stage of bilateral relations." Syria will take control of the Hmeimim air base, near Latakia, and the commercial area of the port of Tartus, while the military facilities at both sites will become joint training centers.
The agreement, negotiated for approximately a year and a half, puts an end to the use of these facilities as exclusively Russian military bases, and maintains Moscow's presence in the Middle East, with privileged access to the Mediterranean. Since the fall of the regime, Russian troops who still remained in Syria had been leaving the country.