Syria’s new leadership faces allegations of mass killings, as Alawite communities endure field executions and mass ...

For decades, schoolchildren began their day with a song of praise to Hafez al-Assad, “our eternal leader.” He died in 2000. He was succeeded by his son Bashar, who received similar praises.

Return of foot-and-mouth disease in Hungary rekindles farmers’ concerns Bosnia’s defiant Serb leader Dodik sentenced to one year in prison ...

Beirut: Journalists sometimes hear shocking statements—ones they lock away in their memory, fearing their repercussions. Some are too violent, too damaging, or too costly to repeat. Others risk swift ...

How did Assad gain power? Through old-fashioned dynastic succession. He became president in 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, a tyrant who had ruled Syria for 30 years.

He was referring to the slogan “Hafez Assad forever," which was coined by supporters of Hafez Assad (Bashar Assad's father) in the early 1970s. Now Syrians are calling the fall of Bashar Assad ...

Bassel al-Assad died in a 1994 road accident. He had been the presumed successor to his father Hafez al-Assad who set up the paranoid, secretive, repressive system of government that Bashar ...

Syria’s security forces arrested a former intelligence chief Thursday who is accused of carrying out hundreds of assassinations under ex-regime leader Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian news agency SANA ...

Finally, we won! The lion has fallen!” In Arabic, Assad means “lion,” although that wasn’t his real name. Hafez, Bashar’s father, had adopted it to look strong. Hasan was born in the ...

Syria's centuries-old Jewish community was able to practise their religion under then president Hafez al-Assad, but the strongman prevented them from leaving the country until 1992. After that, their ...