Bashar Hafez al-Assad is the President of Syria. The statesman and politician has held the highest post since 2000. He succeeded his father, Ghafiz al-Assad, who ruled in Syria since 1971. Despite hopes for democratic reforms and a revival of the Syrian economy, Bashar al-Assad largely continued his father's authoritarian methods. Since 2011, Assad has faced a major uprising in Syria that has turned into a civil war.
Brief biography of the President of Syria
Bashar al-Assad was born on September 11, 1965 in Damascus. He was the third child of Hafiz al-Assad, a Syrian military officer and member of the Baath Party, who rose to the presidency in 1971 in a coup d'état. Assad's family belonged to the Syrian "Alawite minority", a Shia sect that traditionally makes up about 10 percent of the country's population.
Bashar was educated in Damascus and studied medicine at Damascus University, graduating in 1988 with a degree in ophthalmology. He then served as a military doctor in a hospital, and in 1992 he moved to London to continue his studies. In 1994, his older brother, who was named his father's heir, died in a car accident. Bashar, despite his lack of military and political experience, returned to Syria. To strengthen his position among the military and intelligence services of the country, he studied at the military academy. As a result, he was promoted to colonel and led the Republican Guard.
Career
Shafiz al-Assad died on June 10, 2000. A few hours after his death, the national legislature approved a constitutional amendment that lowered the minimum age for a president from 40 to 34 years old (that is how old Bashar al-Assad was at the time). On June 18, Assad was appointed general secretary of the ruling Baat party, and two days later, the party congress appointed him as a candidate for the presidency, the national legislature approved the appointment. Assad was elected for a seven-year term.
While many Syrians objected to the transfer of power from father to son, Bashar's rise generated some optimism both in Syria and abroad. His youth and education seemed to provide an opportunity to retreat from the image of an authoritarian state controlled by a network of powerful duplicate security and intelligence agencies and a stagnant state economy. In his inaugural speech, Assad reaffirmed his commitment to economic liberalization and promised political reform, but he rejected Western-style democracy as a suitable model for Syrian politics.
Assad said he would not support policies that could threaten the rule of the Baat Party, but he slightly eased government restrictions on freedom of expression and released several hundred political prisoners from prison. These gestures fueled a brief period of relative openness, termed "Damascus Spring" by some observers, during which socio-political discussion forums and calls for political reform opened. However, a few months later, the Assad regime changed course, using threats and arrests to extinguish pro-reform activities.
Syrian civil war
In March 2011, Assad faced a major challenge to his rule when a series of anti-government protests took place in Syria, inspired by a wave of democratic uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. Assad offered various concessions, first by reshuffling his cabinet and then announcing that he would seek to repeal Syria's emergency legislation used to suppress political opposition. However, the implementation of these reforms coincided with a significant escalation of violence against protesters, attracting international condemnation of Assad and his government.
As a result of unrest in new areas of the country, the government deployed tanks and troops to several cities, which became centers of protest. Amid reports of massacres and indiscriminate violence by security forces, Assad argued that his country was the victim of an international conspiracy to provoke a war in Syria and that the government was fighting networks of armed insurgents rather than peaceful protesters.
Armed opposition groups emerged and launched increasingly effective attacks against the Syrian army. Attempts at international mediation by the League of Arab States and the United Nations failed to achieve a ceasefire, and by mid-2012 the crisis had turned into a full-scale civil war.
By the end of 2017, Assad's dominance in most of Syria's major cities had been restored.
