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Syrian court sentences Bashar al-Assad to death for murder, torture, crimes against humanity

The Jerusalem Post · back to the audit

Former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was convicted of premeditated murder of multiple people, including children, torture, arbitrary detention, and crimes against humanity, and was sentenced to death on Tuesday, Syria's official news agency SANA confirmed.

Assad fled Damascus in December 2024 and has been living in the Moscow area since.

He was tried in absentia.

Atef Najib, a security official under Assad, was also sentenced to death.

Assad, who was born in 1965, became president in 2000 after his father Hafez died. He maintained the family's rule and the dominance of their Alawite sect in the Sunni Muslim-majority country and Syria's status as an Iranian ally hostile to Israel and the US.

Shaped in its early years by the Iraq war and crisis in Lebanon, Assad's rule was defined by civil war, which spiraled out of the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets, to be met with deadly force.

Reuters contributed to this report.