The Fall of the House of Assad
A detached ruler, obsessed with sex and video games, refused every lifeline he was offered.
Updated at 12:18 p.m. ET on February 14, 2026
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Some dictators go down fighting. Some are lynched and strung up for their victims to spit on. Some die in bed.
Bashar al-Assad, who oversaw the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of his fellow Syrians during a quarter century in power, may have achieved something new in the annals of tyranny. As the rebels closed in on Damascus on December 7, 2024, Assad reassured his aides and subordinates that victory was near, and then fled in the night on a Russian jet, telling almost no one. I remember seeing a statement issued that same evening declaring that Assad was at the palace performing his “constitutional duties.” Some of his closest aides were fooled and had to escape the country however they could as rebel militias lit up the sky with celebratory gunfire.
Assad’s betrayal was so breathtakingly craven that some people had trouble believing it at first. When the facts became impossible to deny, the loyalty of thousands of people curdled almost instantly into fury. Many swore that they had always secretly hated him. There is an expression in Arabic for this kind of revisionist memory: When the cow falls, the butchers multiply.
But the emotion was real for many, as was the belief that Assad was solely responsible for everything that had gone wrong. “You can still find people who believe in Muammar Qaddafi, who believe in Saddam Hussein,” Ibrahim Hamidi, a Syrian journalist and editor, told me. “No one now believes in Bashar al-Assad, not even his brother.”
