Assad’s Death Sentence Is the New Regime’s First Real Weapon

The image that matters is not the judge speaking on state television. It is Atef Najib in a cage in the Palace of Justice, and Bashar al‑Assad condemned to die far away, beyond the reach of the marshal. When a regime that for fifty years governed through prisons, disappearances and armored divisions puts its former security chief in a dock and sentences its ex‑prince in absentia, it is not doing philosophy. It is doing the rough carpentry of a new order. The words about crimes against humanity explain little; the effectual truth is that a new power is teaching Syrians whom to fear and whom to hate now.

The old house ruled in the oldest way: with steel in the barracks and terror in the cellars. A brother commands the 4th Armored Division, which opponents accuse of killings, torture, extortion, drug trafficking, its own detention centers. A cousin heads political security in Deraa, accused of a regime of murder, torture, forced disappearances. According to one report, more than 181,000 people are forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily detained during the war, most of them by this same state. This is not accidental excess; it is design. As I argued in the Discourses, laws must assume men are bad; here the rulers assumed it and chose to be worse.

The spark in 2011 is almost comically small for the fire it sets: teenagers writing graffiti, seized and allegedly tortured, protests in Deraa, a violent crackdown that grows into a fourteen‑year war and roughly half a million dead. When you build your authority on fear, every wall is wet with fuel. The question is never whether a prince will repress; it is how he measures it. In The Prince, in W.K. Marriott’s translation, I wrote that it is “much safer to be feared than loved” when one must choose, but that a wise ruler avoids being hated. Here, disappearances on such a scale and the cruelty of the security organs cross that invisible line where fear ripens into hatred and hatred into arms.

For a long time, fortune indulges them. They hold power for decades; the dungeons and divisions do their work. Yet as I wrote elsewhere in that same book, fortune is like a raging river that floods where no dykes are raised. The rulers of Syria raised dykes only of intimidation. They did not build any channels for the people’s grievances, no serious institutions to contain the hatred their methods bred. When the river came in 2011, and again later as the war ground on, they answered only with more of the same steel and darkness. What made them was also what unmade them; they never changed their nature with the times.

Their fall in 2024, in only eleven days of campaigning, shows how hollow a terror‑state can become. When a dynasty collapses that quickly after half a century, it means arms remained, but belief had rotted away. The great no longer trusted the family to maintain their fortunes; the people no longer feared enough to stay still; new commanders under a new president judged the occasion ripe. Once the prince flees—here to another power’s protection—and his brother’s feared division cannot save him, all the vanished reappear in memory. Numbers like 181,000 lost do not just weigh on conscience; they become political capital for anyone who promises a reckoning.

The new government understands that arms are not only rifles. They arrest Najib in 2025 in Latakia, bring him back to Damascus, line up dozens of plaintiffs, and then stage the first sentences against the old inner circle in a Fourth Criminal Court. This is not mere morality; it is strategy. As I wrote in the Discourses, Rome’s tumults between the people and the great produced its liberty because they were given institutional form. These trials are an attempt to turn fury that might become vendetta or civil war into a legal spectacle, to concentrate the people’s hatred on a few caged men instead of on the new rulers and their inevitable failures.

But here lies the danger for any new prince or republic. To found new modes and orders, one must punish severely but once, and build afterwards on law, not perpetual purges. A death sentence in absentia is theatrically satisfying and practically useless unless it is followed by sober governance and visible restraints on the new security forces. The people have long memories and keen noses; as I noted in the Discourses, they are often more constant than any prince. If the cages fill only with yesterday’s enemies and never with today’s abusers, the court becomes just another arm of faction. Then the middle course returns: cruelty without security, mercy without trust. And that is how states die twice.