\n Bashar al-Assad and his brother Maher have fled Syria and will be tried in absentia [Getty]<\/p>\n
A Syrian <\/a>court conducted the first hearing Sunday in the trial of ousted ruler Bashar al-Assad<\/a> and senior figures from his government, one of whom appeared in person.<\/p>\n Assad and his brother Maher have fled Syria and will be tried in absentia, but one of their relatives, former security official Atif Najib, was in the dock in handcuffs.<\/p>\n “Today we begin the first trials of transitional justice in Syria,” judge Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan declared as he opened the session.<\/p>\n “This includes a defendant in custody, present in the dock, as well as defendants who have fled justice,” he said.<\/p>\n A judicial source, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said the proceedings marked the beginning of preparations for the trials of Assad, his brother, and other prominent figures like Najib.<\/p>\n Najib, who was arrested in January 2025 in the aftermath of the collapse of the Assad government, appeared in court in Damascus in a striped prison jersey.<\/p>\n He previously headed Syria’s political security branch in the southern province of Daraa, where Syria’s 2011 uprising first erupted.<\/p>\n He is accused of leading a broad campaign of repression and arrests there.<\/p>\n Syria’s 13-year civil war killed more than half a million people and displaced millions of others.<\/p>\n Assad’s forces pounded rebel-held areas, including with airstrikes and crude barrel bomb attacks, while tens of thousands of people disappeared, some into the country’s brutal prison system.<\/p>\n Assad fled to Moscow as rebel-led forces closed in on Damascus in December 2024, ending more than five decades of his family dynasty’s rule.<\/p>\n The judge did not question Najib during Sunday’s session, which was dedicated to “preparatory administrative and legal procedures”, and announced that a second hearing would be held on May 10.<\/p>\n The judicial source said in-person trials will include Wassim al-Assad, another relative of the ousted president, former grand mufti Ahmed Badreddin Hassoun, as well as military and security officials arrested by the new authorities in recent months.<\/p>\n Syria’s new authorities have repeatedly vowed to provide justice and accountability for Assad-era atrocities.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bashar al-Assad and his brother Maher have fled Syria and will be tried in absentia [Getty] A Syrian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84637,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[7156,670,95,1823],"class_list":{"0":"post-84636","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-syria","8":"tag-assad-regime","9":"tag-damascus","10":"tag-syria","11":"tag-trial"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116472380279825546","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}