The first reality about a man like Bashar al-Assad is that his power never needed his presence. A face image on a wall, at any distance, could occupy a child’s mind across a border it had never crossed. What his prisons did to the body up close, his image did faintly to the spirit from far away.
This week a court in Damascus sentenced that face to death, and he was not there to hear it. On the eleventh of August, the Fourth Criminal Court convicted Bashar al-Assad in absentia of murder, torture, and crimes against humanity, and condemned him to die. He remains in Moscow, granted asylum by Russia after his government fell in December 2024, beyond the reach of the sentence and, for now, of nearly everything else. The verdict is the first against him since his family’s five decades of rule ended, and, by his admission, it is mostly symbolic.
The Debate Is Not the Center
A moral compass is put to the test when a victim is to decide how to respond to a villain. Whether the average person supports or opposes that death sentence is not the center of this conversation. Families who survived Assad cope differently. Some long to exist in a world where he no longer breathes; others see that very death, gruesome as it sounds, as the most merciful thing he could ever be granted. These are coping mechanisms, and I meet them from a place of empathy rather than tolerance of violence. I choose not to judge but to understand, to hold an open conversation unbound by righteousness.
Losing someone in any of the ways Assad chose will always remain indigestible. People endured atrocity for years, on every scale, with only death on either side as the singular end to pain. The world abandoned entire populations to their tormentor, left them frozen in time and living in fear, while the international community offered objections that reached no further than bold statements. The past few years have been a broken record of bold statements. If survivors now wish death upon the man they most feared, they are only the product of that inaction and its performative posture. Who are we, then, to rush to judge them, when for years no one offered them a redirection, a promise that this would never happen again, or a solution that was safe in practice and not only in concept? That was never within their reach. And now, when the reckoning finally arrives, it arrives as a sentence that cannot be carried out.
This is not to diminish the importance of the international community; on the contrary. Given the inability of laws to protect and the paralysis of the very nongovernmental organizations created to safeguard vulnerable communities in times of distress, it is time to pursue solutions that are actionable, operational, and measurable beyond the literature. The impact you hope to see moves through people. The fine line between right and wrong is not the point of the conversation. Frustration and distrust are.
What a Trial Restores
There is something therapeutic about watching trials unfold. They stretch across months, evidence flooding the courtroom, witnesses surfacing the stories, the testimonies of victims heard in the silence of a room, one account after another. There is a deeper reason for them than catharsis. Justice after dictatorship has to demonstrate the very thing dictatorship destroyed: that no one stands above the law and no one falls beneath its protection. A credible trial is not a favor to Assad, and not a softening of his guilt. It is the proof that law has returned, and that proof requires that even he, the man who ruled as if the law did not apply to him, receive the process he denied everyone else. The entitlement is not mercy. A society that tries him fairly says aloud the thing he spent a lifetime denying: that it is governed by rules and not by rulers.
That is the standard, and the present deserves to be measured against it honestly. The court that condemned Assad tried him as an absent defendant, alongside his brother Maher and other senior figures who had fled or vanished. When the same court convicted his cousin Atef Najib, one of the few former officials actually in custody, monitors from the Syria Justice and Accountability Center called it a historic step that nonetheless exposed serious flaws: proceedings that felt rushed, testimony that did not clearly tie the accused to the charges, and a defense that did little to defend. Lawyers have warned that the trials may be running ahead of any settled framework for transitional justice. None of this is a reason to abandon the effort. It is a reason to get it right, because a reckoning that cuts the same corners the old regime cut teaches the wrong lesson about the new order.
What the Sentence Is Worth
To Assad, a dying body is a closed account, and he knew it. His machinery of death was built to kill the spirit first, until the body itself became collateral. What, then, is a death sentence, that instant seizure of everything, to a man who found his muse in protracted, terrorizing cruelty? For Assad, a body was a record of his atrocities, and death was never the worst thing that could befall a person. He understood the worth of an identity precisely because his pleasure lay in stripping it away. His prisons redefined what it means to be alive and what it means to be dead.
There is a colder irony in this particular sentence. It cannot be enforced while he sits in Moscow, and by choosing death, the court may have made his return less likely rather than more, since any state that refuses to extradite a person to a death penalty now has its reason ready. The Syrian human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni, himself once imprisoned under Assad, called it performative justice rather than transitional justice in a Reuters interview on August 11.
A confession, then, because the wish and the principle are not the same thing. Part of me wants him to suffer, wants him diminished: the reachable dictator after the untouchable force, the gray cell for a home, the diluted identity thinned to nothing, the man left to live inside a memory of himself as the unremarkable remainder of who he was. To him, death is familiar; confinement is not, and neither is being ordinary, or being held accountable. But the wish meets its own limit. His one body could never hold the suffering of the hundreds of thousands he brutalized; no pain inflicted on him would ever balance that ledger, and to reach for it is to accept his own premise, that justice is a measure of pain. It is not. What matters more than his suffering is a justice whose face is not tainted by tyranny, one that refuses the instruments he used and so becomes the very thing he could never have made. Set the wish beside that principle, and the principle rules. If lawful accountability happens to make him ordinary, that is not a cruelty but the point: it is what the law does to any man once it stops treating him as a god, and answerable is unremarkable.
What Looked Like Justice
Saddam Hussein’s trial once looked like justice to me. I remember him sitting and listening to the record of his crimes, his power drained inside the courtroom despite his fidgeting attempts to exercise it through constant interruptions, and the feeling that this was what a reckoning looked like. It was a younger judgment on my part, and it mistook the shape of what looked like justice for the actual substance of what justice is.
The trial that reduced him was itself unsound. It was run by a tribunal convened under foreign occupation, its rules largely drafted and its courtroom largely financed by the government that had invaded, which stained its legitimacy before a word of evidence was heard. Three defense lawyers were murdered as the proceedings went on. The bench turned over by roughly eighty percent; one chief judge resigned over government interference, and another was removed after he was seen as too lenient toward the accused. Saddam went without access to his lawyers for the first year of his detention, counsel he had rejected was imposed on him, and the statements of prosecution witnesses were entered into the record without the defense being allowed to question them. Then the failure that mattered most: he was tried and hanged for a single case, the killing of roughly a hundred and fifty people at Dujail, while the far larger crime, the Anfal campaign that killed tens of thousands of Kurds, was still being heard. His execution ended that trial before it could finish, and the charges died with him. The fuller record was never completed in a courtroom. And the hanging itself, carried out at dawn on a holy day against Iraq’s own law, filmed on a phone as guards taunted him on the gallows, turned what was meant to embody law into something that looked like factional revenge.
What looked like justice ended the man without finishing the record. That is the warning I now hold. The purpose of a trial is to do, in the open and without shortcuts, the one thing he never did: apply the law completely, to everyone, including him. Syria stands exactly where that warning points, with the same chance to build the rule of law and the same temptation to perform it instead.
And I found myself thinking of Saddam’s daughter. How does a person hold that much polarity at once? To lose a father, to know that father was a war criminal, to know that his own world had already taken her husband from her. To grieve and to reckon in the same breath, to mourn a man the world was right to condemn. Justice never arrives cleanly. It ripples into lives that did no wrong and asks them to carry what cannot be reconciled.
I looked, afterward, for some part of her that was not loyal. I searched the years after the trial for a crack, a moment she might concede and admit what he was. It never came. And I understood that the invincibility he had built for his family was the most durable thing he ever made. The world he raised around them had taught them they were untouchable, and that lesson outlived his defeat. This is what a trial, done properly, reaches that an execution cannot. Exposure weakens the man, but it also thins the aura of untouchability itself, the very inheritance a dynasty exists to pass down. The same logic governs the Assad family. The father ruled, then the son, and the line was meant to run into the next generation, because a dynasty survives on the belief that its name sits beyond the reach of any court. A trial completed in the open diminishes not only the person but the name behind him, and forecloses the claims that would rise after him. Death can leave the myth intact, and can even sanctify it. Only the slow, public unmaking of the name empties it of the power to be inherited.
His First Prisoners Will Be His Last
In the end, Assad’s absence does what his presence never allowed. Whether by death or by flight, his removal does not settle the account; it transfers it. The full weight of what he was comes down not on him but on the family left to carry his name, the ones who were his first prisoners. Before the country, before the cells, there was the house, where the same invincibility that ruled a nation ruled the household, and where loyalty was not chosen but conditioned. If he is begoned, they are left to hold a debt they did not incur, to answer for a man who never answered for himself. This is the tyrant’s last cruelty: he arranges to be absent from his own reckoning and leaves it to the people he captured earliest to bear it in his place.
The fuller answer was always the harder one: to try him in the open, completely, under the same law he placed himself above, and to let that law, not a foreign country’s convenience, reduce him to what he now is, a man answerable for what he did.
Assad does not feel remorse and does not connect with the world the way an empathetic person does. What he feels is power, and its absence. That is the one register left to him, which is why the law, not pain, but the plain and unbearable ordinariness of a tyrant made subject to the law like anyone else, is what reaches him: it takes away the only thing he ever truly held. Sentence him, in the end, to unremarkable living.
