It wasn’t supposed to end this way for Bashar al-Assad.
Before he became the unlikely leader of his country, responsible for a bloody civil war, and then a guest of Russia, Syria’s now exiled president studied to be an ophthalmologist.
Assad and his family fled the country on 8 December 2024, after a lightning rebellion entered the capital, Damascus.
They are suspected to now be guests of Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, bringing to a close his family’s brutal dynasty of more than 50 years.
It’s an ignominious end to a career that had looked so different and promised so much a few decades earlier.
It was Assad’s siblings who appeared more interested in the military and politics, according to the Wall Street Journal. Certainly, it appeared to be older brother Bassel’s destiny to lead the country.
Assad’s vision for his nation looked very different as he developed his own interest in science and medicine, attended the Lycée Francais in Damascus and studied medicine at Damascus University, from which he graduated as a doctor.
Motivated by the way science could be harnessed to give people sight, he moved to Britain in the 1980s to start postgraduate training in ophthalmology at London’s Western Eye Hospital.
But whatever plans he might have had for health care in his own country, or addressing the eyecare of his citizens, that all ended in 1994 when Bassel was killed in a car crash.
At the age of 29, Assad was thrust into the role of unlikely heir and eventual dictator.
And his vision for Syria would become something very different and destructive.
