Sentence to death the Syrian ex-dictator Bashar al-Assad

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 has sentenced al-Assad "to death in absentia," as he has been in exile since the fall of the regime in Moscow.

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." "The criminal Bashar al-Assad's contribution to the crimes was as the highest decision-maker, he mobilized state institutions to commit them," said the judge.

The Syrian war left at least 570,000 dead and more than 1.5 million injured, according to estimates verified by UN agencies. The war also caused millions of displaced people: 5.5 million Syrians remain internally displaced, and 3.6 million Syrians continue to be registered as refugees abroad. Currently, at least 15.6 million people continue to need humanitarian assistance. Sednaia prison was the symbol of repression. It was known by the nickname of the "human slaughterhouse" of Bashar al-Assad's regime. Once the regime fell, the inspection of the facilities revealed the inhumane conditions in which political prisoners lived: torture, mass executions...

The court also sentenced eight more people to death, 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 was part of the hearing against this latter man, Atef Najib, the former dictator's cousin and then head of the Political Security branch in Deraa. Deraa is the Syrian city where the popular revolts began in 2011, which led to the war in the country that lasted fourteen years.

Najib is the only one on the list of names sentenced this Tuesday who is currently detained in Syria. With the start of the revolts, he was sent to northern Syria and then went into hiding. He was missing from mid-2011 until he was captured in a security raid in the Syrian coastal town of Latakia on January 31, 2025. The rest of the convicted, with Bashar al-Assad at the head, are fugitives from justice.

The life of the ex-dictator in exile

Since fleeing Syria in late 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 former dictator's new life. Among other things, it was revealed that he lived in a luxury skyscraper. 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.