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Bashar al-Assad (born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian politician, dictator and military officer who served as the 19th president of Syria from 2000 until his government was overthrown in 2024. As president, Assad was the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and the secretary-general of the Central Command of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. He is the son of Hafez al-Assad, who was the president 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 accident, Assad was recalled to Syria to take over Bassel's role as heir apparent. Assad entered the military academy and took charge of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon in 1998. On 17 July 2000, Assad became president, succeeding his father, who had died on 10 June 2000. A series of crackdowns in 2001–02 ended the Damascus Spring, a period marked by calls for transparency and democracy.
Academics and analysts characterized Assad's presidency as a highly personalist dictatorship, which governed Syria as a totalitarian police state, and was marked by numerous human rights violations and severe repression. 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 members of the Old Guard resigned or were purged and the political inner-circle were replaced by staunch loyalists from Alawite clans. Assad's early economic liberalisation programs worsened inequalities and centralized 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. The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in February 2005, triggered by the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, forced Assad to end the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.
In 2011, the United States, European Union, and majority of the Arab League called for Assad to resign following the crackdown on Arab Spring protesters during the events of the Syrian revolution, which led to the Syrian civil war. The civil war has killed around 580,000 people, of which a minimum of 306,000 deaths are non-combatant; according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, pro-Assad forces caused more than 90% of those civilian deaths. The Assad government perpetrated numerous war crimes during the course of the Syrian civil war, while its army has carried out several attacks with chemical weapons (most notably, a sarin gas strike in Ghouta on 21 August 2013). The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that findings from an inquiry by the UN implicated Assad in war crimes, and he faced international investigations and condemnation for his actions.
In November 2024, a coalition of Syrian rebels mounted several offensives against the country with the intention of ousting Assad. In 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.
Bashar al-Assad was born in Damascus on 11 September 1965, as the second son and third child of Anisa Makhlouf and Hafez al-Assad.[14] "Al-Assad" in Arabic means "the lion". Assad's paternal grandfather, Ali al-Assad, had managed to change his status from peasant to minor notable and, to reflect this, in 1927 he had changed the family name from "Wahsh" (meaning "Savage") to "Al-Assad".
Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, was born to an impoverished rural family of Alawite background and rose through the Ba'ath Party ranks to take control of the Syrian branch of the Party in the Corrective Movement, culminating in his rise to the Syrian presidency. Hafez promoted his supporters within the Ba'ath Party, many of whom were also of Alawite background. After the revolution, Alawite strongmen were installed while Sunnis, Druze, and Ismailis were removed from the army and Ba'ath party. Hafez al-Assad's 30-year military rule witnessed the transformation of Syria into a dynastic dictatorship. The new political system was led by the Ba'ath party elites dominated by the Alawites, who were fervently loyal to the Assad family and controlled the military, security forces and secret police.
The younger Assad had five siblings, three of whom are deceased. A sister named Bushra died in infancy. Assad's younger brother, Majd, was not a public figure and little is known about him other than he was intellectually disabled, and died in 2009 after a "long illness".
Unlike his brothers Bassel and Maher, and second sister, also named Bushra, Bashar was quiet, reserved and lacked interest in politics or the military. The Assad children reportedly rarely saw their father, and Bashar later stated that he only entered his father's office once while he was president. He was described as "soft-spoken", and according to a university friend, he was timid, avoided eye contact and spoke in a low voice.
Assad received his primary and secondary education in the Arab-French al-Hurriya School in Damascus. In 1982, he graduated from high school and then studied medicine at Damascus University.
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