Syria Sentences Assad to Death

PHOTO CAPTION: FILE PHOTO: A member of the former rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham stands guard near an image of Syria's Bashar al-Assad at the fourth division headquarters in Damascus, Syria, January 23, 2025 REUTERS/Yamam Al Shaar/File Photo

DAMASCUS, Aug. 11 — A Syrian court sentenced ousted leader Bashar al-Assad to death on Tuesday after convicting him in absentia of crimes including killings, torture and arbitrary arrest during the country’s nearly 14-year war.

It was the first Syrian conviction against Assad, who was ousted in a rebel offensive in December 2024 that ended decades of his family’s rule. The war killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, and crowds gathered around the court in Damascus on Tuesday, chanting, clapping and waving Syrian flags as news of the sentences spread.

Assad fled Damascus as rebel fighters closed in nearly two years ago and is now in Russia, where he and his family were granted asylum on humanitarian grounds.

Former officials also sentenced

During Tuesday’s trial of 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 same sentence was issued in absentia against Assad’s brother Maher, who led the Fourth Armoured Division. The unit was responsible for crackdowns on protests and recapturing territory for Assad and was accused of playing a leading role in drug production and trafficking that enriched the former president.

Atef Najib, an Assad-era security official in the southern province of Deraa, also received a death sentence. Najib, a cousin of the Assad family, was detained by Syrian security forces in early 2025 and was the only defendant among the three to be tried in person.

Deraa was where the first protests against Assad began in 2011. Crowds gathered there Tuesday carrying photographs of people arrested or killed during the war, including Hamza al-Khatib, a 13-year-old boy whom activists said was arrested, tortured and killed by Syrian security forces.

Noha al-Masri, a prosecutor present for the sentencing whose brother was killed in a crackdown on a Deraa protest in 2011, said the ruling matched the scale of Syrians’ suffering.

“The ruling that came, as we expected, was as big as the sacrifices that Syrians gave for 15 years, as big as the suffering of the families and relatives of the martyrs,” Masri told Reuters.

Questions over extradition

The sentencing followed a nearly four-month trial that Syria’s new Islamist-led authorities presented as part of a broader effort to pursue transitional justice after Assad’s rule.

Some legal advocates, however, said imposing the death penalty could make it more difficult to bring Assad and other defendants back to Syria to face justice.

“There is a huge problem, which is that no one will hand over a criminal to a country that issues a death sentence,” said Anwar al-Bunni, head of the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research. “This will cut off the road to Assad, and many other criminals, being handed over to Syria.”

“This is performative justice, not transitional justice,” Bunni told Reuters.

Assad, born in 1965, became president in 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez. He maintained his family’s rule and the dominance of their Alawite sect in Sunni Muslim-majority Syria, while keeping the country aligned with Russia and Iran and hostile to Israel and the United States.

His rule was ultimately defined by the conflict that emerged from the 2011 Arab Spring protests, when Syrians demanding democratic reforms were met with deadly force by security forces. U.S. President Donald Trump called Assad an “animal” in 2018 over accusations that his government used chemical weapons, allegations Assad denied.

In 2024, rebels led by now-President Ahmed al-Sharaa swept across Syria in a lightning offensive lasting less than two weeks, bringing Assad’s rule to an end.

Assad also faces an arrest warrant in France over the 2012 bombing of a press center in Homs.

(Source: Reuters)