Bashar al-Assad
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- The world won't listen - true-to-you.net (November 18, 2013)
- Morrissey: "The last thing security forces ever want is peaceful protest" - Vegan Logic (September 5, 2014)
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Bashar al-Assad (born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian politician, military officer and dictator who served as the president of Syria from 2000 until his government was overthrown in 2024. As president, Assad was commander-in-chief of the Syrian Arab Armed Forces and secretary-general of the Central Command of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. He is the son of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria from 1971 until his death in 2000. In the 1980s, Assad became a doctor, and in the early 1990s he was training in London as an ophthalmologist. In 1994, after his elder brother Bassel al-Assad died in a car crash, Assad was recalled to Syria to take over Bassel's role as heir apparent. Assad entered the military academy and in 1998 took charge of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon begun by his father. On 17 July 2000, Assad became president, succeeding his father, who had died on 10 June 2000. Many hoped the UK-educated young man would bring reform to Syria and relax the occupation of Lebanon. These hopes were dashed following a series of crackdowns in 2001–2002 that ended the Damascus Spring, a period defined by calls for transparency and democracy. Bashar's rule would become more repressive than his father's. Assad's regime was a highly personalist dictatorship which governed Syria as a police state which have been described as totalitarian or authoritarian and which committed systemic human rights violations and war crimes, making it one of the most repressive regimes in modern times. The regime consistently ranked as the 'worst of the worst' within Freedom House indexes. His first decade in power was marked by extensive censorship, summary executions, forced disappearances, discrimination of ethnic minorities and extensive surveillance by the Ba'athist secret police. While the Assad government described itself as secular, various political scientists and observers noted that his regime exploited sectarian tensions in the country. Although Assad inherited the power structures and personality cult nurtured by his father, he lacked the loyalty received by his father and faced rising discontent against his rule. As a result, many people from his father's regime resigned or were purged, and the political inner-circle was replaced by staunch loyalists from Alawite clans. Assad's early economic liberalization programs worsened inequalities and centralised the socio-political power of the loyalist Damascene elite of the Assad family, alienating the Syrian rural population, urban working classes, businessmen, industrialists and people from once-traditional Ba'ath strongholds. Assad was forced to end the Syrian occupation of Lebanon during Lebanon's Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005, which was triggered by the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri. The Mehlis report implicated Assad's regime in the assassination, with a particular focus on Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleiman, and Jamil Al Sayyed. After the Syrian revolution began in 2011, Assad led a deadly crackdown against Arab Spring protests which led to outbreak of the Syrian civil war. The Syrian opposition to Bashar al-Assad, United States, European Union, and the majority of the Arab League called on him to resign that year but he refused and the war escalated. Between 2011 and 2024, over 600,000 people were killed in the civil war, with pro-Assad forces causing more than 90% of total civilian deaths. In 2013, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that findings from a UN inquiry directly implicated Assad in heinous atrocities and crimes against humanity. Assad's perpetration of numerous war crimes led to international condemnation and isolation against his regime. Throughout the civil war, the Ba'athist Syrian armed forces also carried out several chemical attacks. In November 2024, a coalition of Syrian rebels mounted several offensives with the intention of ousting Assad. On the morning of 8 December, as rebel troops first entered Damascus, Assad fled to Moscow and was granted political asylum by the Russian government. Later that day, Damascus fell to rebel forces, and Assad's regime collapsed.