A Syrian court sentenced Bashar Assad to death in absentia on Tuesday, the first such ruling against him since the Assad family’s power ended 20 months ago. The same verdict also sentenced Maher Assad and Atef Najib, placing three names long tied to the country’s security apparatus at the center of a case over crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The sentences were handed down at the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus, where Judge Fakhareddine al-Aryan said, “Bashar Assad used state agencies to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The ruling gives legal form to accusations that have shadowed the 14-year conflict and now reaches Assad himself after years in which he remained beyond the court’s reach.
The courtroom scene underscored how far the case has moved from the streets where the uprising began. Atef Najib stood inside a cage wearing a prisoner’s uniform as the judge read the sentence, a detail that sharpened the contrast between the men once associated with state power and the system now judging them. Najib was convicted of overseeing a crackdown in Daraa that helped trigger the uprising and later the civil war, and he had already been sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury in April 2011.
Najib was a former Syrian army brigadier general and head of the Political Security Branch in Daraa in 2011, when more than a dozen teenagers who wrote anti-government graffiti on a school wall were arrested and tortured during his tenure. That episode in southern Syria became one of the early turning points in the country’s 14-year conflict, which left about half a million people dead and eventually widened into war across the country.
The friction in the case is hard to miss. Assad and Maher Assad fled to Russia after the government’s fall in December 2024 and received political asylum, yet Syria’s new rulers are asking Russia to hand the Assads over. Maher Assad, a former commander of the Syrian military’s 4th Armored Division, has also been accused by Syrian opposition activists of killings, torture, extortion and drug trafficking, and of running his own detention centers.
The verdict is therefore less an end point than a legal marker of the new order in Damascus. Syria has now put death sentences on Assad and men from his inner circle, but the next move depends on whether Russia returns them or keeps them out of reach, leaving the first major postwar judgment to stand on paper while the most important test sits with Moscow.
