Bashar Al-Assad is the President of the Syrian Arab Republic. On July 17, 2000, he inherited the presidency after his father’s death, Hafez Al-Assad, who seized power through a coup in 1970. Bashar inherited a network of ruthless intelligence forces headed mostly by Alawite loyalists. Assad’s regime is a complex inseparable amalgam of the ruling elite, military, and brutal intelligence forces that profess fidelity solely to the Assad family.

Bashar al-Assad studied medicine at Damascus University, graduating as an ophthalmologist in 1988. He then served as an army doctor at Tishreen Military Hospital and, in 1992, moved to London to continue his studies. In 1994 his older brother, Basil, who had been designated his father’s heir apparent, was killed in an automobile accident, paving the way for Bashar to inherit the presidency following a Russian recommendation to his father.

Bashar al-Assad is responsible for killing, displacing, detaining and torturing at least half of the Syrian population, mainly since the violent repression of the 2011 Arab Spring peaceful protest movement known as the Syrian Revolution. International, humanitarian, and war crimes include daily bombardments, chemical attacks on innocent civilians, and the bombing of hospitals, among many others, since March 2011. In an inquiry to the UN’s human rights office, Commissioner Navi Pillay said that there is evidence that war crimes were authorized in Syria “at the highest level of the government, including the head of state,” President Bashar al-Assad.

Notably, he gave the order to attack Eastern Ghouta with chemical weapons on August 21, 2013 in which, according to the most conservative estimates, over 280 civilians were killed. According to an unpublished joint inquiry for the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which was seen by Reuters, identified 15 people who are responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Syria. The document mentioned that the decision was taken from the top ranks, including Bashar al-Assad and his brother Maher. Additionally, many experts are convinced that Assad authorizes the use of chemical weapons in Syria. 

Stephen Rapp, former United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, has argued,

A trove of evidence has been amassed against the Syrian president is even stronger than what the Allies used to convict Nazis at Nuremberg. The Nazis were famous for documenting their atrocities, but he says even they didn’t take photos of individual victims with identifying information. […] There are thousands of photos of victims tortured to death by Assad’s minions and the paperwork linking their murders to the Syrian dictator.

Among the most concrete forms of evidence are the Caesar File (a collection of over +55,000 photos evidencing torture corroborated by official governmental institutions, which are the main evidence for the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019), and more recently ‘The Gravedigger’ who provided testimony of the presence of mass graves in Syria, as he personally worked in them and identified them via satellite imagery. These mass graves contain the bodies of most of the over 610,000 victims of the Assad regime’s brutal campaign that has extended for 11 years, which Bashar al-Assad leads.