September 11, 1965 - Bashar al-Assad
A trained physician who inherited authoritarian rule from his father, Assad oversaw a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians and displaced millions more, with his government documented using chemical weapons and systematic torture against its own population. The gap between early expectations of reform and the reality of his presidency became one of the starkest such reversals in modern Middle Eastern politics. He held power for nearly a quarter century before being driven from it in 2024.
From Wikipedia
Bashar Hafez al-Assad (born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian former politician, medical doctor, military officer, and dictator who served as the president of Syria from 2000 until his overthrow in 2024 after the Syrian civil war. He is the son of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria from 1970 to 2000. His rule as president was a highly personalist dictatorship that governed Syria as a totalitarian police state, becoming arguably more repressive than his father. In August 2026, Assad was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by a Syrian court and sentenced to death in absentia.
In the 1980s, Assad became a doctor, and in the early 1990s he was training in London as an ophthalmologist. In 1994, after his elder brother Bassel al-Assad died in a car crash, Assad was recalled to Syria to take over Bassel's role as heir apparent. Assad entered the military academy and in 1998 took charge of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon begun by his father. On 17 July 2000, Assad became president, succeeding his father, who had died on 10 June 2000.
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