Assad ruled Syria with iron fist before defeat in civil war

DAMASCUS, Aug 11 - Bashar al-Assad's 24-year rule of Syria ended abruptly in December 2024 following a lightning advance by rebel forces who struck while the Russian and Iranian allies who had backed him through years of civil war were distracted by conflicts elsewhere.

He fled to Moscow, ending more than five decades of iron-fisted rule by his family and opening a new chapter for Syria.

The historic shift was underscored on Tuesday when a Damascus court sentenced him to death in his absence for crimes including killings, arbitrary arrests and torture during the years in which he clung to power.

Assad became president in 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez.

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

Assad turned the full power of the Syrian military against his opponents as he sought to crush the rebellion inspired by the Arab Spring movement that had toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia.

Inquiries by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations concluded that government forces under Assad used the nerve agent sarin and chlorine as a weapon in attacks during the civil war on rebel-held areas.

Following one poison gas attack in 2018, then-U.S. President Donald Trump declared Assad an "animal". Authorities denied using chemical weapons, which killed and injured thousands during the war.

His ruthless approach to fighting rebels, including siege warfare tactics condemned as "medieval" by U.N. investigators, drew comparisons with the way his father had defeated Islamist insurgents in the 1980s.

Justifying his response, Assad compared himself to a surgeon cutting into a wound. "Do we say to him: 'your hands are covered in blood?' Or do we thank him for saving the patient?" he said in parliament in 2012.

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the war, cities were flattened, and more than a quarter of the population fled abroad.

A CRUMBLING ARMY

His grip on power appeared to be slipping in the first years of the war, as much of Syria fell to insurgents, some of them backed by Turkey, Gulf Arab states and the United States.

Shi'ite militias backed by his ally Iran began arriving in 2012 to fight on his side, shoring up his hold on Damascus. The arrival of Russia's air force in 2015 allowed Assad to go on the offensive and claw back the bulk of the country.

He outlasted many of the foreign leaders who believed his demise was imminent in the early days of the conflict.

But reliant on Moscow and Tehran for military support and with parts of Syria still beyond his grasp, Assad's rule remained precarious. In late 2024, insurgents seized a moment of opportunity, attacking when Iran had been weakened by conflict with Israel and Russia was distracted by its war in Ukraine.

Syria's demoralised army crumbled as rebels led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa's Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group swept towards Damascus. Assad left the capital, first to a Russian airbase in Latakia, before being evacuated to Moscow on December 8, 2024.

'STATE-RUN MACHINERY OF DEATH'

Prisoners freed from Syria's notorious jails recounted the torture and abuse they'd endured. An international war crimes prosecutor, visiting Syria after Assad was toppled, said evidence emerging from mass grave sites exposed a "state-run machinery of death". He accused the Assad-led state of having conducted organised killing comparable to Nazi Germany.

In October 2025, Reuters revealed that the Assad government had secretly moved thousands of bodies to a site in the desert east of Damascus, to hide evidence of atrocities.

From the start, Assad described the conflict as an international conspiracy against a country that had stood in opposition to the United States and its Middle Eastern allies, especially Israel. He characterised the rebels as foreign-backed Islamist extremists who would have been easily defeated were it not for their supporters overseas. He dismissed the idea that there was such a thing as a moderate Syrian opposition.

After Sharaa, a former al Qaeda commander, seized power in Damascus, Assad issued a written statement saying that "the state had fallen into the hands of terrorism".

BARREL BOMBS

Assad hailed from Syria's Alawite minority, a group which follows a religion that is an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam and had historically been based in Syria's coastal region.

Along with the presidency, he also inherited the leadership of the Syrian branch of the Baath Party, an Arab nationalist movement established in the 1940s.

Assad publicly held fast to the idea of Syria as a bastion of secular Arab nationalism even as the conflict appeared ever more sectarian, pitting his Alawite-led state and its Shi'ite backer Iran against insurgents drawn from the Sunni Muslim majority and supported by Sunni-led states.

The use of chemical weapons against rebel-held areas of Syria marked some of the most extensive uses of poison gas since World War One.

The deadliest such attack was on rebel-held Ghouta in 2013. The attack with sarin gas killed hundreds of people. It prompted no Western military response. The threat of a U.S. missile strike was averted when Moscow brokered a deal for Syria's chemical weapons to be destroyed by the following year.

After another sarin attack, in 2017, Trump ordered a cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base.

Earlier this year, the transitional leadership that took power after Assad was toppled said it had located remnants of a clandestine chemical weapons programme, including raw materials and munitions similar to those used to carry out deadly gas attacks during the civil war.

Assad consistently denied accusations that the state was to blame, in one instance accusing the global chemical weapons watchdog of fabricating a report about the use of chlorine gas at Washington's behest, echoing a broader pattern of rejecting allegations of state brutality.

In a BBC interview in 2015, he appeared to make light of accusations that the army was dropping barrel bombs – barrels packed with explosives that cause indiscriminate destruction – saying: "I haven't heard of the army using barrels, or maybe, cooking pots."

When tens of thousands of photos were smuggled out of Syria showing brutal torture of people in government custody, Assad dismissed it as part of a plot funded by Qatar.

In 2025, France issued an arrest warrant for Assad and other former Syrian officials over the bombing of a press center in the city of Homs in 2012.

EYE DOCTOR

Assad hadn't always been destined for the presidency: Hafez had groomed another son, Bassel, for the role. But when Bassel died in a car crash in 1994, Bashar was transformed from an eye doctor in London - where he studied as a postgraduate - to heir apparent.

The early days of his rule gave rise to cautious optimism about reform in Syria, where a feared security apparatus had underpinned Hafez al-Assad's rule since 1971. But this hope soon evaporated. The police state remained intact, perpetuating repression that ultimately fuelled the uprising against his rule in 2011.

Dissidents were jailed and economic reforms contributed to what U.S. diplomats described, in a 2008 embassy cable released by WikiLeaks, as "parasitic" nepotism and corruption.

While the elite did well, drought was driving the poor from rural areas to slums where the revolt would blaze.

He is married to  British-born former investment banker, Asma Akhras, with whom he has three children. REUTERS