From eye doctor to brutal dictator: The rise (and fall) of Syria's Bashar Assad

Bashar Assad never intended to go into politics.

He became one of the world's most brutal dictators, whose thuggish rule ended abruptly when rebels stormed into Damascus Saturday night, causing his army ? and him ? to flee.

Instead, Assad, the second son of former Syrian ruler Hafez Assad, planned to be an ophthalmologist. He studied in Syria and then London before his career as an eye doctor was cut short by his elder brother Bassel's fatal car crash in 1994.

In the three decades since, criticism from around the world grew as he lethally gassed many thousands of his own people and sought help from Iran and Russia to fend off efforts by the United States, its allies and even a few terrorist groups to overthrow him.

Here's how Assad rose from that unintended beginning as the leader of the strategically important Middle Eastern nation, with a key port on the Mediterranean, to the iron-fisted strongman whose abdication was cheered Saturday by nearly everyone in Syria ? and around the world.

More: How Syria rebels' stars aligned for Assad's ouster

Following in the footsteps of his father

Assad's rise to power in June 2000 prompted skepticism and outright derision. Just 35, he was said to lack virtually all of the qualities that made his charismatic father popular, especially political and leadership experience in maneuvering Syria's complex tribal power dynamics.

Updates: Assad flees to Russia; chemical weapons in Syria a 'top-tier priority'

Some believed he might evolve into a more decisive and effective ruler if he could somehow manage to remain in power.

"Bashar's incompetence risks frittering away Hafez's hard-won power," Middle East Forum founder and analyst Daniel Pipes wrote in a column published June 6, 2001, describing him at the end of his first year in office as "bumbling through from one day to the next."

"Unless he is a whole lot craftier than he has so far shown," Pipes wrote, "the days of the Assad dynasty may well be numbered."

By July 2006, his influence in the Middle East was enough to prompt then-President George W. Bush to single out Syria and Iran as "the root cause" of the terrorist attacks destabilizing neighboring Lebanon.

"And in order to be able to deal with this crisis, the world must deal with Hezbollah, with Syria, and to continue to work to isolate Iran," Bush said at the time.

Things get complicated

In 2011, Assad responded to the regional uprising that came to be known as the Arab Spring with an especially brutal crackdown on pro-democracy forces in Syria.

That May, President Barack Obama denounced Assad as a murderer who ordered "the mass arrest of his citizens," prompting Washington to step up sanctions on Syria and "on President Assad and those around him."

"The Syrian people have shown their courage in demanding a transition to democracy," Obama said. "President Assad now has a choice: He can lead that transition, or get out of the way."

Assad doubled down on his autocratic rule. Despite becoming well known for the material excesses of a strongman dictatorship, his wife was featured in a Vogue magazine cover profile, "A Rose in the Desert," which described the Assads as a "wildly democratic" family-focused couple who vacationed in Europe, hobnobbed with American celebrities and had made Syria the "safest country in the Middle East," according to The Atlantic magazine. (The Vogue article was long ago taken offline).

At the time, though, Assad's regime "has killed over 5,000 civilians and hundreds of children this year," The Atlantic reported in January 2012.

By then, Assad's grip on power was challenged on many fronts. That caused him to forge even bigger compromises with Iran, its proxy fighting force Hezbollah and ultimately Russia to protect his regime.

In August 2013, with Syria fully engulfed in a civil war, Assad's forces sent rockets containing lethal Sarin gas ? a largely outlawed chemical weapon ? into opposition-controlled areas outside the capital, Damascus, killing as many as 1,700 people.

Assad's gassing of his own people created such a furor that opposition increased. His unpopularity ultimately made him so reliant on external support that when that support network began to erode, so did Assad's hold on his country of more than 20 million people.

Assad's reliance on Iran and Russia becomes his downfall

As Assad’s regime almost collapsed in 2013 and then again in mid-2015, outside players came streaming in, some invited and some not.

“The war has evolved through five phases that, along the way, have embroiled foreign figures and militias (often on different sides) from dozens of countries, regional governments, and global powers,” Mona Yacoubian, the former deputy assistant administrator of U.S. Agency for International Development, wrote in 2021.

Over time, ragtag opposition groups were bolstered by rebel brigades and then foreign patrons, some sent by Iran, into the fray.

To prop up Assad’s government, Iran sent in Hezbollah fighters and military advisers from its Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Then the Islamic State group rolled in and created a caliphate that claimed about one-third of Syria’s territory.

That prompted the U.S. to support and send its own fighters into the region. And in 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent sophisticated weaponry and air defense systems to defeat rebel factions.

“The roles of Hezbollah and Iran deepened, too,” according to Yacoubian.

Increasingly backed by Iran and Russia, Assad clawed back control of much of the country. But Syria’s war reverberated throughout the Middle East and deep into Europe, sparking one of the largest humanitarian crises since the end of World War II.

But rebel groups maintained control of a stronghold in northwest Syria, and the jihadi group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, rose to prominence.

It emerged from the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, and known as the Nusra Front, but later distanced itself from al-Qaida and sought to market itself as more of a moderate organization. The U.S. and United Nations designated it a terrorist group.

In late November, with Russia busy with its war in Ukraine and Iran hobbled by its conflict with Israel, the rebels – led by HTS – made their move. In a little over a week, they took the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and, on Saturday, Damascus. On Sunday, Assad fled to Russia.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Bashar Assad went from eye doctor to brutal Syrian dictator