A Damascus Court Sentenced Bashar Al Assad to Death for the Murder of Children. He Was in Moscow.
The Fourth Criminal Court condemned nine former regime figures. Only one, Assad's cousin Atef Najib, was in the room to hear it.
A criminal court in Damascus sentenced Bashar Al Assad to death on Tuesday for crimes against humanity, the first conviction of Syria's former president since his government collapsed 20 months ago and the first legal judgment ever rendered inside Syria against the family that ruled it for five decades.
Fakhr Al Aryan, head of the Fourth District Criminal Court, read the sentence "in the name of the Arab people in Syria" against a defendant the court designated a fugitive. "The court convicts Bashar Assad of the premeditated murder of more than one person, including children, and of torture, arbitrary detention, and crimes against humanity," the judge said, "and sentences him to death."
Nine men were condemned in the same proceeding. Alongside the former president were his brother Maher Al Assad, who commanded the army's Fourth Division, and their cousin Atef Najib, the former head of political security in Deraa. Six other former regime officials received the same sentence. Eight of the nine, including both Assad brothers, were tried in absentia. Najib was the only defendant physically present, and the only one who will actually face the punishment in the near term.
That Najib sat in the dock carries particular weight in Deraa, the southern city where the 2011 uprising began. The charges against him included participation in the suppression of peaceful protests using live ammunition, and systematic mass killings and torture of detainees resulting in death inside detention centres. It was in Deraa, under his authority, that the arrest and beating of schoolchildren over anti-government graffiti helped ignite a revolt that became a 14-year war.
The court ordered that both Bashar and Maher Al Assad be pursued internationally, building on an arrest warrant issued against the former president last December. That order runs into an immediate obstacle. Both brothers fled to Russia when the government fell in December 2024 and were granted political asylum there. Moscow has shown no indication it intends to hand them over, and Syria has no mechanism to compel it.
The gap between the sentence and its enforcement is the defining feature of the verdict. Nothing in Tuesday's ruling brings Assad closer to a Syrian prison. What it does is establish, in a Syrian courtroom under Syrian law, a formal finding of what the state did to its own citizens, delivered by judges appointed after the fall rather than by an international tribunal in another country. For the families who filed complaints and the survivors of the detention system, that record is the immediate result. Whether it becomes anything more depends on decisions made in Moscow.
Originally reported by The National.