A Syrian court has handed ousted leader Bashar al-Assad a death sentence in absentia, convicting him of killings, torture and arbitrary arrests tied to the country’s nearly 14-year war.
The ruling marks the first conviction against Assad, whose decades-long family grip on power ended when a rebel offensive ousted him in December 2024, closing a chapter of conflict that killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians.
As rebel fighters closed in on Damascus nearly two years ago, Assad fled the capital and is now in Moscow.
During a trial involving former government officials, a judge sentenced Assad to death for “premeditated and intentional murder of more than one person and of children, torture, arbitrary arrest and crimes against humanity”.
The court also imposed the death penalty on Atef Najib, a security official who served under Assad.
Judges found Najib — a cousin of al-Assad who was arrested in January last year — guilty of crimes including murder, “the intentional killing of children under 15”, and “torture leading to death”.
Calling the acts attributed to him “crimes against humanity”, the court said it was delivering “the harshest punishment against him, which is the death penalty”.
Assad, born in 1965, assumed the presidency in 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez.
He preserved the family’s rule, sustained the dominance of their Alawite sect in a Sunni Muslim-majority country, and kept Syria aligned with Iran as an adversary of Israel and the United States.
After early years shaped by the Iraq war and a crisis in Lebanon, Assad’s tenure became defined by civil war that grew out of the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians calling for democracy took to the streets and were met with deadly force.
