A Syrian court sentenced in absentia ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad along with his younger brother to death on Tuesday for crimes against humanity and war crimes during Syria’s 14-year conflict that left about half a million people dead.
It was the first 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.
Assad fled the capital Damascus as rebel fighters approached nearly two years ago, and is currently in Moscow.
Also sentenced to death in the same case was Assad’s maternal cousin Atef Najib for leading the crackdown in the southern province of Daraa that led to the uprising and later the civil war.
Amid tight security, Najib stood inside a cage wearing a prisoner’s uniform as the judge read the sentence. Najib is a former Syrian army brigadier general who was head of the Political Security Branch in southern Syria’s Daraa province under Assad in 2011.
In a trial of former government officials on Tuesday, a judge handed down a death sentence to Assad over the crimes of "premeditated and intentional murder of more than one person and of children, torture, arbitrary arrest and crimes against humanity".
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 U.S.
Shaped in its early years by the Iraq war and crisis in Lebanon, Assad's rule was defined by civil war, which spiralled out of the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets, to be met with deadly force.