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 iron-fisted rule over Syria, and the brutal war that killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians.
Syrians gathered around the court in Damascus, chanting, clapping and waving the Syrian flag as news of the sentences spread.
Assad fled the capital Damascus as rebel fighters closed in nearly two years ago, and is currently in Russia, where he and his family were granted asylum on humanitarian grounds.
In a trial of former government officials on Tuesday, a judge handed down a death sentence to the former president over the crimes of “premeditated and intentional murder of more than one person and of children, torture, arbitrary arrest and crimes against humanity”.
The judge issued the same sentence in absentia to Assad’s brother Maher, who headed the fearsome Fourth Armoured Division, which was responsible for crackdowns on protests, recapturing Syrian territory on behalf of Assad and was accused of spearheading the production and trade of drugs to enrich Assad.
A death sentence was also handed down to Atef Najib, an Assad-era security official in the southern province of Deraa, where the first protests against Assad erupted in 2011.
Najib, a cousin of the Assads, was detained by Syrian security forces in early 2025 and was the only accused to be tried in person.
In Deraa, crowds also gathered to celebrate and carried pictures of people arrested or killed during the war, including ones of Hamza al-Khatib, a 13-year-old boy who activists said was arrested by Syrian security forces, then tortured and killed.
Noha al-Masri, a prosecutor present at Tuesday’s sentencing, lost her own brother in a crackdown on a Deraa protest in 2011.
“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.
The sentencing follows a nearly four-month trial process, billed by Syria’s new Islamist-led authorities as a sign the country was prioritising transitional justice to move away from Assad’s rule.
However, some said the death sentence would diminish any chance of Assad and his fellow defendants being repatriated to face justice in their home country.
“There is a huge problem, which is that no one will hand over a criminal to a country that issues a death sentence. This will cut off the road to Assad, and many other criminals, being handed over to Syria,” said Anwar al-Bunni, head of the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research.
“This is performative justice, not transitional justice,” Bunni told Reuters.
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 as well as Syria’s status as an ally of Russia and Iran while hostile to Israel and the US.
Shaped in its early years by the Iraq war and Syria’s military presence in Lebanon, Assad’s rule was defined by the war that spiralled out of the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets, to be met with deadly force by his security forces.
Branded an “animal” in 2018 by US President Donald Trump for using chemical weapons – an accusation he denied – Assad outlasted many of the foreign leaders who believed his demise was imminent in the early days of the conflict, when he lost swathes of Syria to rebels.
But in 2024, rebels led by now-President Ahmed al-Sharaa swept across Syria in a lightning offensive that lasted less than two weeks.
Assad already faces an arrest warrant in France over the bombing of a press centre in Homs in 2012. (Reuters)
