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President Bashar al-Assad used Russian and Iranian firepower to beat back rebel forces during years of civil war but never defeated them, leaving him vulnerable as his allies were distracted by wars elsewhere and his enemies were on the march.
The rebels’ meteoric advance through western Syria marks one of the gravest threats to half a century of Assad family rule in Damascus, and a seismic moment for the Middle East.
Statues of Assad’s father and brother have been toppled in rebel-held towns, while photos of him on billboards and government offices have been torn down, stamped on, burned or riddled with bullets.
The Syrian presidency issued a statement on Saturday denying that Assad has left the country and that he is carrying out his duties in Damascus.
Assad became president in 2000 after his father Hafez died, maintaining their Alawite sect’s dominance in the Sunni Muslim-majority country and Syria’s status as an Iranian ally hostile to Israel and the US.
His rule in the early years was shaped by the war in Iraq and the crisis in Lebanon. His rule has been defined by the civil war that grew out of the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets and were met with deadly violence.
Branded an “animal” by US President Donald Trump in 2018 for using chemical weapons – a charge he denied – Assad has outlasted many of the foreign leaders who believed his demise was imminent in the early days of the conflict, when he lost parts of Syria to rebels.
Aided by Russian airstrikes and Iranian-backed militias, he reclaimed much of the territory lost during years of military offensives, including siege warfare that UN investigators condemned as “medieval.”
With his opponents largely confined to a corner of northwestern Syria, he presided over several years of relative peace, although large parts of the country remained beyond his reach and the economy was shackled by sanctions.
He restored ties with the Arab states that had once shunned him but remained pariahs to much of the world.
Assad has made no public comments since rebels took Aleppo a week ago, but said in a phone call with the Iranian president that the escalation aimed to reshape the region for Western interests, echoing his view of the uprising as a foreign-sponsored conspiracy.
To justify his response to the uprising in its early stages, Assad compared himself to a surgeon. “Do we say to him, ‘Your hands are covered in blood?’ Or do we thank him for saving the patient?” he said in 2012.
Early in the conflict, as rebels captured city after city, he exuded confidence.
“We will strike them with an iron fist and Syria will return to the way it was,” Assad told soldiers after recapturing the town of Maaloula in 2014.
He kept the first promise, but not the second. Years later, large parts of Syria remained outside state control, cities were razed, the death toll exceeded 350,000 and more than a quarter of the population had fled abroad.
Assad is supported by Syrians who believed he saved them from hardline Sunni Islamists.
As al Qaeda-inspired insurgents rose to prominence, this fear resonated among minorities, even as the rebels went out of their way this week to reassure them that they would be protected.
Assad continued to cling to the idea of Syria as a bastion of secular Arab nationalism, even as the conflict appeared increasingly sectarian. In 2015, he told Foreign Affairs that the Syrian army “made up all levels of Syrian society.”
But for his opponents he fueled sectarianism.
The sectarian nature of the conflict was hardened by the arrival of Iranian-backed Shiite fighters from across the Middle East to support Assad, and by Sunni Muslim-led states including Turkey and Qatar backing the rebels.
Assad’s value to Iran was underlined by a senior Iranian official who declared in 2015 that his fate was a “red line” for Tehran.
While Iran supported Assad, the United States failed to enforce its own “red line” established by President Barack Obama in 2012 against the use of chemical weapons.
UN-backed investigations have found that Damascus has used chemical weapons.
A sarin gas attack on rebel-held Ghouta in 2013 killed hundreds of people, but Moscow struck a deal to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, averting a US response.
Still, poison gas continued to hit rebel areas, with a sarin attack in 2017 prompting Trump to order a cruise missile response.
Assad has denied the state’s accusations.
He also denied that the military had dropped barrel bombs packed with explosives that caused indiscriminate destruction. He appeared to make light of the accusation in a 2015 BBC interview, saying: “I haven’t heard of the army using barrels, or maybe cooking pots.”
He also rejected tens of thousands of photos showing torture of people in government custody as part of a Qatari-funded plot.
When the fighting subsided, Assad accused Syria’s enemies of economic warfare.
But while Assad remained a pariah to the West, some Arab states that once supported his opponents began opening doors to him. A beaming Assad was greeted by leaders of the United Arab Emirates during a visit there in 2022.
Assad often presented himself as a modest man of the people. He appeared in films driving a modest family car and in photographs of his wife visiting war veterans at their homes.
He took office in 2000 after the death of his father, but was not always destined for the presidency.
Hafez had prepared another son, Bassel, to succeed him. But when Bassel died in a car crash in 1994, Bashar went from ophthalmologist in London – where he was doing post-doctoral training – to heir apparent.
When Assad became president, he appeared to implement liberal reforms, optimistically portrayed as “the Damascus Spring.”
He released hundreds of political prisoners, made rapprochement with the West and opened the economy to private companies.
His marriage to British-born former investment banker Asma Akhras – with whom he had three children – helped fuel hopes that he could take Syria down a more reformist path.
Highlights of his early meetings with Western leaders included attending a summit in Paris, where he was guest of honor at the annual Bastille Day military parade.
But as the political system he inherited remained intact, signs of change quickly dried up.
Dissidents were jailed and economic reforms contributed to what US diplomats described as “parasitic” nepotism and corruption in a 2008 embassy cable published by WikiLeaks.
While the elite prospered, the drought drove the poor from the countryside to slums where the uprising would break out.
Tensions with the West following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 have upended the balance of power in the Middle East.
The assassination of Lebanese Rafik al-Hariri in Beirut in 2005 sparked Western pressure that forced Syria to withdraw from its neighbor. An initial international investigation implicated senior Syrian and Lebanese figures in the murder.
While Syria denied its involvement, former Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam said Assad had threatened Hariri months earlier – an accusation Assad also denied.
Fifteen years later, a UN-backed court found a member of the Iran-backed Hezbollah guilty of plotting to assassinate Hariri. Hezbollah, an ally of Assad, denied any role.
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