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How Bashar Assad rose from a comfortable childhood to become one of the deadliest world leaders in modern historyhttps://www.businessinsider.in/how-bashar-assad-rose-from-a-comfortable-childhood-to-become-one-of-the-deadliest-world-leaders-in-modern-history/born-on-september-11-1965-bashar-assad-is-the-third-child-of-the-late-syrian-president-hafez-assad-and-his-wife-anisa-/slidelist/58288529.cms2017-04-21T01:20:14+05:30

How Bashar Assad rose from a comfortable childhood to become one of the deadliest world leaders in modern history

Apr 21, 2017, 01:20 IST

Born on September 11, 1965, Bashar Assad is the third child of the late Syrian President Hafez Assad and his wife Anisa.

As the second son of a president who came to power after a coup, Assad was never expected to take over the presidency from his father.

Assad received a medical degree from the University of Damascus and moved to study ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital in London.

After his older brother Bassel was killed in a car accident in 1994, Bashar was immediately called back to Syria to be trained as the heir to his father's presidency.

Between 1994-2000, Assad received training at the Syrian military academy and headed an anticorruption campaign organized by his father.

When Hafez Assad died in 2000, Bashar took his place. Even though the country had an official election, Assad was presented as the only candidate and came away with more than 97 percent of the vote.

The year he became President, Assad married his wife, the London-born Asma Akhras. Between 2000-2011, the couple had three children.

Assad quickly gained a reputation, however, for cracking down on freedom of expression and detaining and torturing his political opponents.

As the Arab Spring protests rocked the Middle East in 2011, Syrians came out en masse to protest the detention and torture of three teenagers who had scribbled revolutionary graffiti on the wall of their school.

Assad responded with force. By the end of 2011, the country had descended into civil war between Assad loyalists and rebel fighters, many of whom had no prior military experience.

The war has killed more than 400,000 people, destroyed most of the country's cities and infrastructure, and spawned the worst refugee crisis since World War II.

Amid the raging civil war, the Assad regime organized a presidential election in 2014 and won by nearly 90 percent of the vote. The election results were widely denounced as a farce.

Assad was accused of killing more than 1,000 people using sarin gas in the outskirts of Syria's capital, Damascus, in 2013. The Obama administration brokered a deal with Russia to eliminate Assad's chemical weapons stockpile, but the regime has been blamed for another sarin attack carried out earlier this month that killed more than 70 people.

As Assad's government continued to bomb areas with large civilian populations, numerous world leaders and representatives of the UN have accused the Syrian President of war crimes against his own people.

Russia entered the war on behalf of Assad in September 2015, targeting rebel groups with airstrikes. Many of those groups were backed by Washington, creating a de facto proxy war between Russia, Iran, and Syria, on one side, and the US and its allies on the other.

The prolonged fighting has spawned the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Half of Syria's pre-war population is now internally displaced or seeking shelter in the US, Europe, or elsewhere in the Middle East — primarily Jordan and Turkey.

Asma Assad, who was once profiled in Vogue, has quickly lost favor in the international community. A video petition asking her to stop the war has been launched on YouTube.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said recently that Assad's reign in Syria is "coming to an end." But with Russia and Iran staunchly backing the embattled president, it's unclear how the west will leverage his ouster.

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