Where is Assad? Syria's leader flees Damascus, ending brutal dynasty

Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president who inherited power in 2000 with promises of reform, only to brutally suppress his opponents in a war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, has been toppled in a lightning rebel advance.

Assad fled Damascus as Islamist-led opposition forces entered the capital and put an end to more than half-a-century of his family’s rule.

Russia, his main backer, said Sunday that Assad stepped down and left his country, without commenting on where the former president was headed. His whereabouts weren’t immediately clear.

Once courted by European governments, Assad’s transformation from a potential Western ally to a ruler who responded ruthlessly to peaceful protests against his rule took many by surprise.

From using chemical weapons against civilians to widespread torture, Assad faced grave accusations during the Syrian war, but managed to survive the unrest thanks to strong support from Moscow and Tehran.

During his last days in power, Assad’s backers were unwilling or unable to support him in the face of a shock military advance Syrian rebels embarked on just about 10 days earlier.

Unlikely ruler

Bashar Hafez Al-Assad was born on Sept. 11, 1965, in Damascus, the third child and second son of Hafez al-Assad and Aniseh Makhlouf. The family’s roots were in the minority Alawite sect, a small part of the Shiite school of Islam.

Assad’s father was an air force officer who helped lead the 1963 takeover of government by the socialist Baath Party before seizing power himself in a bloodless military coup in 1970.

Assad grew up in the capital and graduated from medical school at Damascus University in 1988, according to his official biography. Fluent in English, he was getting advanced training as an ophthalmologist in London in 1994 when Bassel, his father’s first choice for president, died. Assad went back home to be groomed to lead Syria.

Taking over the authoritarian government at age 34, the tall and soft-spoken Assad pledged to pursue a path of reform and economic liberalization.

Youthful image

Many Syrians, and Arab and Western leaders, were willing to give him a chance partly because he projected a youthful image willing to loosen the government’s grip.

Assad crossed sectarian lines to marry Asma al-Akhras, a Sunni Muslim and the daughter of Syrian expatriates who grew up in Britain. They had two sons, Hafez, born in 2001, and Kareem, born in 2004, and a daughter, Zein, born in 2003.

The couple’s populist touch contrasted with Hafez’s remote and austere approach. At home, Asma, a graduate of King’s College London who worked for New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. for three years, championed women’s rights and education. Abroad, the Assads were given red-carpet welcomes on official visits to Arab and European countries.

In his first months as president in 2000, Assad ordered the release of 600 political prisoners, some of whom were members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist group.

Assad said Syria needed constructive criticism, a radical notion at the time in a country that jailed political opponents. Intellectuals openly called for greater civil liberties and democratic reform. The first months of Assad’s rule were optimistically dubbed the Damascus Spring.

Changing tone

About a year into his presidency, however, the government snuffed out the pro-democracy movement, throwing its leaders in jail. Charges ranged from attempting to change the constitution to inciting sectarian conflicts.

In 2005, opposition groups came together to issue a declaration demanding free parliamentary elections, a national conference on democracy and an end to emergency laws and other forms of political repression. Assad responded by imprisoning its leading signatories.

Then began the street protests of early 2011 at the onset of the Arab Spring. Around that time, Arab heads of state in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen succumbed to uprisings that swept through North Africa and the Middle East.

Assad’s violent reaction to the demonstrators escalated the conflict into a prolonged civil war and emboldened radical groups, including the Islamic State, or ISIS.

Determined not to join the list of deposed Arab rulers, Assad opted to use brutal force including barrel bombs, torture and chemical weapons, to quash dissent, according to the US and other Western nations.

He benefited from the fact that the opposition was fragmented into hundreds of mainly Islamist groups, which the US and its allies supported only warily. Former President Barack Obama and his successor, Donald Trump, ordered waves of airstrikes against Assad strongholds but had little appetite for deeper intervention.

Chemical weapons

In 2013, the US blamed Assad for the death of more than 1,400 people near Damascus in an attack using the nerve agent sarin.

The Assad government blamed the assault on Islamic extremists, but agreed to a US-Russian plan for international monitors to take control of Syria’s chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, Iran and Russia propped Assad up with money, personnel and weapons.

A turning point in the war came in 2015, when Russia joined on Assad’s behalf and, along with Iranian forces, helped Assad halt the advance of opposition troops and begin to recapture territory.

Forces loyal to Assad, with the help of Russia, Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, had managed by 2020 to confine the territory held by militant groups to less than half of the country, replacing all-out war with sporadic fighting.

In 2021, Assad secured a fourth term as president in an election that international observers considered neither free nor fair.

The insurgent threat to Assad’s rule erupted again suddenly at the end of last month, starting with a surprise advance by opposition fighters on the city of Aleppo. The rebellion was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former affiliate of al-Qaeda that’s designated a terrorist organization by the US and others.

“Our goal is to liberate Syria from this oppressive regime,” Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of the group also known as HTS, told the New York Times. He occasionally goes by his real name, Ahmed Al-Sharaa.

During his last days in power, Assad ordered his army to fall back to defend Damascus, essentially ceding much of the country to the insurgents. His last-ditch attempts to remain in power included indirect diplomatic overtures to the US and President-elect Trump.

Iran and Hezbollah, which had reinforced the regime earlier in the civil war, were now significantly weakened by strikes carried out by Israel in its conflict with Iran.

Assad’s downfall ultimately eliminates one of Iran’s main allies in the Middle East and represents a big blow to Tehran’s influence in the region.

Many in neighboring Lebanon blamed Assad for his support of Hezbollah and alleged him of playing a role in the killing of top officials, including former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005.

Displaced society

More than 600,000 people had been killed in Syria’s civil war as of March 2024, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group that closely monitors the conflict. More than half of the prewar population of 23 million had been displaced, either to other regions inside Syria or to other countries, according to the United Nations. That made it one of the gravest refugee crises since World War II.

“Assad is the man who presided over the end of modern Syria,” said Paul Salem, president of the Washington-based Middle East Institute. “The ferocious attacks on the protesters forced it from a discussion about political reform into a shooting war, forcing people to pick up arms and giving advantage to the radicals who have vast experience in warfare,” he said.