On Tuesday, the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus condemned Bashar al-Assad and eight more officials of the fallen regime to death, finding them guilty of crimes against humanity and of war crimes. The verdict was delivered in the country he ruled for twenty-four years, in a courtroom he will never enter. Assad and his brother Maher, condemned alongside him, have been in Moscow since December 2024, when the insurgent offensive led by Ahmed al-Sharaa toppled a dynasty that had ruled Syria for half a century.
The court’s findings were specific. Assad was found guilty of deliberately killing people, among them children, and of torture and arbitrary detention; the totality of the crimes was judged to amount to crimes against humanity. The verdict covers atrocities from a war that lasted fourteen years and took roughly half a million lives. Of the nine men sentenced, only one was tried in person: Atef Najib, Assad’s cousin, who once ran the regime’s Political Security office in Deraa, the city where the uprising began. Najib’s own indictment describes the suppression of peaceful protests with live ammunition and the systematic killing and torture of detainees in detention centers. The other eight were tried in absentia, and the court ordered that Assad and Maher be pursued internationally.
The verdict is the second act of a reckoning that began in December, when Damascus issued an arrest warrant for Assad over murder and torture, the first time the country he once governed had taken legal aim at him. The new authorities have since arrested hundreds of officials and operatives from the old security apparatus, and they have asked Russia to hand over the Assads. Moscow has not done so, and no one expects it to. The men at the top of the old regime, the ones with the most blood on the record, are precisely the ones who got out.
The gap between the sentence and its enforcement is the real story. A death sentence for a man who will never stand before the court that pronounced it is, in one sense, theater: the sentence cannot be carried out while Russia shelters him, and the international pursuit order will test the patience of every capital that hosts an Assad-linked asset or official. But the verdict is not only theater. For a decade, Syrian dissidents chased Assad through Western courts and international tribunals without results; the crimes were documented, the witnesses scattered, the jurisdiction always somewhere else. The Damascus court has done what the Hague and the Western capitals could not: it has named the crimes, in the regime’s own country, in the regime’s own legal language, and attached the penalty.
That is why the sentence matters even if it is never carried out. It closes the period in which the old regime’s crimes were treated as a matter for foreign courts and refugee testimony, and opens a period in which they are a matter of Syrian law, pronounced by Syrian judges, against the men who ordered them. The verdict also puts the question to Moscow in a form it cannot easily ignore: the world’s courts, and now Syria’s, have called Assad a murderer. Russia has called him a guest. Those two positions are no longer compatible in public.
The sentence will be read in Damascus as justice begun and in Moscow as a gesture. Both readings are correct, and neither is complete. The court could not reach the man, but it reached his record, and it has given the history of the war an ending the regime never intended to provide: the dictator condemned to death by the people he ruled, even as he dines in a city three time zones away.