Syrian President Assad fled Damascus, and the military said that the Assad family’s half-century rule has ended.
Assad was born in Damascus on September 11, 1965. He is the second son of the late former President Hafez Assad. He was originally an ophthalmologist and had no great political ambitions, but after his elder brother Bassel Assad died in a car accident in 1994, his father turned to cultivate him as his successor.
Syria has been ruled by the Assad family since Hafez became president in 1970. The Assad family belongs to the Alawite sect of Islam, which is a minority sect in Syria, which is dominated by Sunnis.
After Hafez’s death in 2000, according to Syrian law, the president must be at least 40 years old. The Syrian parliament immediately lowered the minimum age limit of the president stipulated in the constitution to 34 years old. Bashar was successfully elected in July and was successively elected president in 2007, 2014 and 2021.
Assad’s father brutally suppressed dissent. Assad has continued his family’s iron-fisted rule and maintained Syria’s status as an ally of Iran, hostile to Israel and the United States.
Assad’s early rule was affected by the Iraq War and the Lebanese crisis, and the conflict caused by the 2011 democratic protests known as the “Arab Spring” later evolved into a civil war that swept the country.
The conflict was made more severe by the support of Shiites supported by Iran and the support of Sunni-led countries such as Turkey and Qatar for the anti-government forces.
In the early stages of the conflict, Assad lost a lot of territory, but with the support of Russia and Iran, Assad regained most of the lost ground after years of military offensives.
“We will hit them with an iron fist, and Syria will return to its former appearance,” he said after retaking the town of Maaloula in 2014.
However, he only fulfilled the first half of his words, but failed to realize the second half. In the following years, most of Syria remained out of state control, and several towns were attacked by sarin gas. A sarin gas incident in 2017 prompted the United States to launch cruise missiles to suppress the situation in Syria.
However, Assad has always denied that the government was responsible for these sarin gas incidents, and he also denied that the army threw barrel bombs filled with explosives.
Years of civil war have left cities devastated, with a death toll of up to 350,000, and more than a quarter of the population fleeing abroad.
Assad’s ruling event book
2000: Inherited his father as president
2005: Former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri was killed, and Syria was accused of committing the crime, but Assad denied involvement and withdrew troops from Lebanon, ending 29 years of military and political rule over Lebanon.
2011: Arab Spring protests broke out in Syria, and Assad launched a bloody crackdown, which eventually triggered a full-scale civil war.
2012: The Syrian government began to use heavy weapons to attack rebels, and was also accused of using chemical weapons, but Assad firmly denied it.
2020: Russia and Turkey reach an agreement to declare a ceasefire, but Syria is still bombed and intermittently attacked by jihadists. The war has killed more than 500,000 people, forced half of the population to flee, and Assad has been condemned by many countries.
2023: France issues an international arrest warrant for Assad’s suspected involvement in the 2013 Syrian chemical weapons attack.
November 27, 2024: Opposition forces led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham Organization launch an offensive and capture several cities, including Homs, Aleppo, Hama and Damascus.
