Former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is said to be reviving his ophthalmology career.
Assad, responsible for a bloody civil war that is believed to have killed 620,000 people and displaced nearly 14 million more, fled the country on 8 December 2024, after a lightning rebellion entered the capital, Damascus.
He and his family are now living in exile in Russia.
The Guardian has reported that Assad, a London-trained ophthalmologist, has returned to the profession and is taking ophthalmology lessons.
“He’s studying Russian and brushing up on his ophthalmology again,” The Guardian reported a friend of the Assad family as saying.
Before he became the dictator, Assad had developed his own interest in science and medicine.
He 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 his older brother, Bassel, was killed in a car crash.
At the age of 29, Assad was thrust into the role of unlikely heir and eventual dictator.
