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Who Was in Ousted Syrian President Assad’s Inner Circle and Where Are They Now?

Bashar al-Assad, right, and his brother Maher Assad, center, stand during the funeral of their father, former President Hafez al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, June 13, 2000. (AP Photo, File)
Bashar al-Assad, right, and his brother Maher Assad, center, stand during the funeral of their father, former President Hafez al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, June 13, 2000. (AP Photo, File)
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Who Was in Ousted Syrian President Assad’s Inner Circle and Where Are They Now?

Bashar al-Assad, right, and his brother Maher Assad, center, stand during the funeral of their father, former President Hafez al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, June 13, 2000. (AP Photo, File)
Bashar al-Assad, right, and his brother Maher Assad, center, stand during the funeral of their father, former President Hafez al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, June 13, 2000. (AP Photo, File)

After opposition fighters toppled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad this month, many senior officials and members of his dreaded intelligence and security services appear to have melted away. Activists say some of them have managed to flee the country while others went to hide in their hometowns.

For more than five decades, the Assad family has ruled Syria with an iron grip, locking up those who dared question their power in the country's notorious prisons, where rights groups say inmates were regularly tortured or killed.

The leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham opposition group — which led anti-government fighters who forced Assad from power — has vowed to bring those who carried out such abuses to justice.

“We will go after them in our country,” said HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, who was previously known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani. He added that the group will also ask foreign countries to hand over any suspects.

But finding those responsible for abuses could prove difficult.

Some 8,000 Syrian citizens have entered Lebanon through the Masnaa border crossing in recent days, according to two Lebanese security officials and a judicial official, and about 5,000 have left the neighboring country through Beirut’s international airport. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Most of those are presumed to be regular people, and Lebanon’s caretaker Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi said earlier this week that no Syrian official entered Lebanon through a legal border crossing.

In an apparent effort to prevent members of Assad's government from escaping, the security officials said a Lebanese officer who was in charge of Masnaa was ordered to go on vacation because of his links to Assad's brother.

But Rami Abdurrhaman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, says several senior officers have nonetheless made it to neighboring Lebanon using travel documents with fake names.

Here's a look at Assad and some of the officials in his inner circle.

Bashar Assad

The Western-educated ophthalmologist initially raised hopes that he would be unlike his strongman father, Hafez, when he took power in 2000, including freeing political prisoners and allowing for a more open discourse.

But when protests of his rule erupted in March 2011, Assad turned to brutal tactics to crush dissent. As the uprising became an outright civil war, he unleashed his military to blast opposition-held cities, with support from allies Iran and Russia.

He has fled to Moscow, according to Russian state media.

Maher Assad

The younger brother of the ousted president was the commander of the 4th Armored Division, which Syrian opposition activists have accused of killings, torture, extortion and drug trafficking, in addition to running its own detention centers. He is under US and European sanctions. He disappeared over the weekend, and Abdurrhaman said he made it to Russia.

Last year, French authorities issued an international arrest warrant for Maher Assad, along with his brother and two army generals, for alleged complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity, including in a 2013 chemical attack on opposition-held Damascus suburbs.

Maj. Gen. Ali Mamlouk

Mamlouk was a security adviser to Assad and former head of the intelligence services. He is wanted in Lebanon for two explosions in the northern city of Tripoli in 2012 that killed and wounded dozens.

Mamlouk is also wanted in France after a court convicted him and others in absentia of complicity in war crimes and sentenced them to life in prison. The trial focused on the officials’ role in the 2013 arrest in Damascus of a Franco-Syrian man and his son and their subsequent torture and killing.

Abdurrahman said Mamlouk fled to Lebanon, and it is not clear if he is still in the country under the protection of Hezbollah.

Brig. Gen. Suheil al-Hassan

Al-Hassan was the commander of the 25th Special Missions Forces Division and later became the head of the Syrian Special Forces, which were key to many of the government's battlefield victories in the long-running civil war, including in Aleppo and the eastern suburbs of Damascus that long held off Assad's troops.

Al-Hassan is known to have close ties to Russia and was praised by Russian President Vladimir Putin during one of his visits to Syria. Al-Hassan's whereabouts are not known.

Maj. Gen. Hussam Luka

Luka, head of the General Security Directorate intelligence service, is not well known among the wider public but has played a major role in the crackdown against the opposition, mainly in the central city of Homs that was dubbed the “capital of the Syrian revolt.”

Luka has been sanctioned by the US and Britain for his role in the crackdown. It's not clear where he is.

Maj. Gen. Qahtan Khalil

Khalil, whose whereabouts are also unknown, was head of the Air Force Intelligence service and is widely known as the “Butcher of Daraya” for allegedly leading a 2012 attack on a Damascus suburb of the same name that killed hundreds of people.

Other officials

— Retired Maj. Gen. Jamil Hassan, former head of the Air Force Intelligence service, is also suspected of bearing responsibility for the attack in Daraya. Hassan was among those convicted in France this year along with Mamlouk.

— Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Ali Abbas and Maj. Gen. Bassam Merhej al-Hassan, head of Bashar Assad’s office and the man in charge of his security, are accused of human rights violations.

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Features

How a Surgeon Kept a Sudan Hospital Functioning on the War’s Front Line

Dr. Jamal Eltaeb checks a patient at Al Nao Hospital in Omdurman, on the outskirts of Khartoum, Saturday, April 18, 2026. (AP)
Dr. Jamal Eltaeb checks a patient at Al Nao Hospital in Omdurman, on the outskirts of Khartoum, Saturday, April 18, 2026. (AP)
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How a Surgeon Kept a Sudan Hospital Functioning on the War’s Front Line

Dr. Jamal Eltaeb checks a patient at Al Nao Hospital in Omdurman, on the outskirts of Khartoum, Saturday, April 18, 2026. (AP)
Dr. Jamal Eltaeb checks a patient at Al Nao Hospital in Omdurman, on the outskirts of Khartoum, Saturday, April 18, 2026. (AP)

For three years, Dr. Jamal Eltaeb made excruciating choices. Who should live and potentially die? Should he operate without the right medicines if it might save someone's life? How would he find fuel to keep the hospital's lights on?

As Sudan 's war raged around him, only one decision was easy: Keep working.

The orthopedic surgeon was leading Al Nao hospital in Omdurman, just outside the capital, Khartoum, as control of the urban area shifted between Sudan's army and paramilitary fighters. As the front line moved closer and the hospital overflowed with patients, some colleagues lost their nerve and left.

The soft-spoken Eltaeb was a rare surgeon who remained. Even as the hospital was bombed more than once. Even as most medical supplies ran out.

“I weighed the options of staying here, and taking care of your patients and helping other people that need you as a skilled surgeon, rather than choose your own safety,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.

He is one of countless Sudanese who have pitched in to help as the world largely looks elsewhere, distracted by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. He has seen the bodies behind the estimates of tens of thousands of people killed, and what it means — day to excruciating day — when the United Nations warns his country's health system is near collapse.

Nearly 40% of Sudan's hospitals no longer function. Many have been stripped for parts or used by armed groups as bases. Sudan’s army has since retaken the capital, and Al Nao remains one of the area's only functioning health centers.

Oxygen canisters and hospital beds at a war-damaged section of Al Shaabi Hospital in Khartoum, Saturday, April 18, 2026. (AP)

Some operations were done on the hospital floor

Walking through the complex, the 54-year-old showed AP journalists the remnants of some of the hardest months of his life.

Over there was a window that was struck, killing the relative of a patient. And there in the courtyard was the last tent standing of the many erected during the peak of the conflict to accommodate mass casualties.

“We were working everywhere, in tents, outside, on the floor, doing everything to save patients’ lives,” he said.

The work earned Eltaeb the $1 million Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, which honors individuals who risk their lives to save others. He gave some of the money to medical and humanitarian groups around the world.

Before the war, staffers said, Al Nao was a quiet hospital with its nearly 100 beds empty much of the time. But when fighting began in Khartoum and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces captured swaths of the city, patients hurried in.

Eltaeb's own hospital elsewhere closed shortly after the war began in April 2023, and he moved to Al Nao. By July, most of the staff had fled, leaving him in charge.

He and a handful of employees and volunteers struggled to keep the place running. Electricity was out for weeks as the facility relied on the army to supply fuel for generators. Medicines like antibiotics and painkillers ran out.

‘From that moment, we knew that we are a target’

In August, a month after Eltaeb took charge, the hospital was hit for the first time.

“From that moment, we knew that we are a target ... And from that time, they didn’t stop targeting us,” he said. The RSF later struck the hospital three more times.

Normality had crumbled. A father of three, Eltaeb sat in his office and handed out sweets to a steady stream of patients and staff vying for his attention.

Decisions were nearly impossible. On a particularly harrowing day in late 2024, he and his team scrambled to triage over 100 wounded people after a strike hit a nearby market. Eight of them died.

“You choose ... as if you can choose who is going to live and who is going to die,” he said.

The day only got worse. Eltaeb had to decide whether to amputate on children without full anesthetic because they were bleeding heavily and he didn't have time to transport them to the operating room.

Using local anesthetic, he removed an arm and leg of a 9-year-old boy and a leg of his 11 year-old sister.

He now scrolls through photos of such surgeries on his phone, attempting to explain to the world a horror few can grasp.

A member of the military media accompanied the AP during the visit, including during interviews. The AP retains full editorial control of its content.

A guard walks through a war-damaged section of Al Shaabi Hospital in Khartoum, Saturday, April 18, 2026. (AP)

Volunteers delivered supplies by bicycle

The hospital relied on volunteers to keep supplies coming. They would post what they needed on social media, and pharmacists would provide the keys for their long-closed shops and allow volunteers to take medicines and other items for free.

One volunteer, Nazar Mohamed, spent months riding around Omdurman, often on a bicycle, delivering supplies while explosions echoed.

Other donations came from organizations and individuals abroad. A network of Sudanese doctors overseas provided remote advice on coping with mass casualties or what to do when antibiotics or anesthesia ran low.

The hospital's remaining staffers got creative, making beds and crutches out of wood and using clothes instead of gauze for makeshift splints.

The war moves on and support does, too

Fighting has shifted away from the Khartoum area. Some funding-strained organizations that supported Eltaeb's hospital now assist places more in need.

He said there is enough money until June to pay salaries and keep generators running, but they will need some $40,000 a month for the hospital to function.

While some countries have pledged support to help Sudan's reconstruction, there's concern the war with Iran might divert attention and resources.

Hospitals that were hit harder than Al Nao lie in ruins and need much more.

Across town, Dr. Osman Ismail Osman, director of Al Shaabi hospital, said the several hundred thousand dollars the government has provided is a drop in the bucket.

The RSF occupied his hospital during the war. Dusty, broken medical equipment worth millions of dollars is piled up, and chunks of concrete are scattered with metal beds.

The goal of opening the badly damaged hospital for emergency referrals within weeks is ambitious, but medical workers like Eltaeb have learned how to approach the impossible.

“I believe I did my best as a doctor as a Sudanese,” the surgeon said.

Features

Dealing with the Dead in the Ruins of Sudan’s War

This photo taken on April 18, 2026 shows Sudanese Ali Gebbai, a volunteer responsible for handling burial procedures for unidentified bodies in the capital, Khartoum, examines one of the unidentified corpses at the mortuary of Omdurman's Al-Nao Educational Hospital. (AFP)
This photo taken on April 18, 2026 shows Sudanese Ali Gebbai, a volunteer responsible for handling burial procedures for unidentified bodies in the capital, Khartoum, examines one of the unidentified corpses at the mortuary of Omdurman's Al-Nao Educational Hospital. (AFP)
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Dealing with the Dead in the Ruins of Sudan’s War

This photo taken on April 18, 2026 shows Sudanese Ali Gebbai, a volunteer responsible for handling burial procedures for unidentified bodies in the capital, Khartoum, examines one of the unidentified corpses at the mortuary of Omdurman's Al-Nao Educational Hospital. (AFP)
This photo taken on April 18, 2026 shows Sudanese Ali Gebbai, a volunteer responsible for handling burial procedures for unidentified bodies in the capital, Khartoum, examines one of the unidentified corpses at the mortuary of Omdurman's Al-Nao Educational Hospital. (AFP)

At a makeshift morgue in Khartoum, engineer turned mortician Ali Gebbai clicked through a spreadsheet of the dead. Thousands of entries, each with a photo and burial site, keep a harrowing record of Sudan's war.

Every time the team of volunteers finds a body, they post to social media and wait 72 hours in the hopes that the victim's loved ones will come across the picture and claim the person.

"We photograph every body. We check if there's anything in their pockets to help us identify them, and we mark the spot where we buried them," Gebbai told AFP.

It was a blazing April day and a dead woman lay on the ground of the small, air-conditioned room in the Sudanese capital, her brown-speckled thobe pulled over her face and body.

If no one came to identify her, the team would prepare a clean white shroud, wash her according to Muslim custom and bury her nearby.

It is all anyone in Khartoum can hope for by way of a morgue. And it is far more than what most victims of Sudan's war receive: a shallow grave, hastily dug into the dirt where they fell.

The conflict, now in its fourth year, between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has no confirmed toll, though it has killed at least tens of thousands, and aid workers give estimates of more than 200,000.

"It's disheartening, all these estimations. When you have a population not knowing what has happened, that trauma and the impact cannot be overlooked," Jose Luis Pozo Gil, the International Committee of the Red Cross's deputy Sudan chief, told AFP.

In the year since the army recaptured Khartoum, authorities have exhumed and reburied "around 28,000 people", Hisham Zein al-Abdeen, head of forensic medicine at Sudan's health ministry, told AFP. And they have only cleared a little over half the capital.

Gebbai said he and his teams have buried 7,000 dead since the war began.

Ethnic massacres in Darfur, meanwhile, have killed thousands of people at a time, and this year alone at least 700 died in drone strikes on Kordofan.

- Morgues destroyed -

Across the country, there is nowhere to store the dead, and no way to count them.

During the worst massacres, when firebombs tear through mosques and markets, rescuers routinely run out of shrouds. The dead are buried where they lay, wrapped in their own clothes or plastic bags, often in villages with no clinic to speak of, much less a morgue that can send information to a central authority.

Zein al-Abdeen, one of only two forensic doctors in Khartoum, said the capital's morgues "were already full before the war".

According to the ICRC, Khartoum's four morgues were all forced out of service by the war, but the dead remained inside.

"When we went inside the Omdurman morgue, there were still many bodies. And there hadn't been any electricity for a long time -- you can imagine the state," Pozo Gil said.

The Omdurman morgue was "completely destroyed" in a strike, Zein al-Abdeen said, its compressors looted while bodies lay rotting everywhere they looked.

His team has been exhuming Khartoum's dead for a year, focusing on "those buried in shallow graves, in public spaces, in sewers and along the Nile".

As bullets flew and artillery arched over the river to crash into homes and hospitals, trapped civilians could not reach the next street over, much less the cemetery. So people buried their loved ones in courtyards, at playgrounds and on street corners.

Over three years, it turned Khartoum into an open-air graveyard.

"That leaves a mark on society, it destroys human dignity and it normalizes death," Zein al-Abdeen said.

The same is true for the rest of Sudan: in Darfur, where pools of blood could be seen in satellite images; in al-Jazira, where bodies were dumped in canals; and in Kordofan, where killer drones still stalk civilians.

- Finding the missing -

Most of those exhumed and reburied in Khartoum are identified, Zein al-Abdeen said, by families who buried their loved ones themselves but needed authorities to give them a proper resting place.

But many are not. From every anonymous body, authorities remove a small bone or a piece of hair, in hopes they will one day be identified. But Sudan has no working DNA labs to test the samples, and nowhere to store them until then.

"The safest place to keep the DNA samples is buried separately in the ground, and marked clearly," Zein al-Abdeen told AFP, "or we'll exhume the bodies again later."

According to the ICRC, there are at least 11,000 missing persons in Sudan.

"We know that the lack of closure for families leaves an open wound. In any kind of recovery in the future, in order to find closure, to rebuild trust, the issue of the missing has to be addressed," Pozo Gil said.

Gebbai the mortician spoke with steely-eyed resolve, but it began to crack when he remembered one young man.

"He was looking for his father and his uncle for over a year. When he came to us, he found out they had both been shot dead in the street in the early weeks of the war. It broke him, he collapsed and cried for a long time."

But at last, at least, he could visit their graves.

Features

A Lesson from 1915 … Why the Strait of Hormuz Can’t be Taken by Force

FILE PHOTO: Strait of Hormuz map is seen in this illustration taken April 15, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Strait of Hormuz map is seen in this illustration taken April 15, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
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A Lesson from 1915 … Why the Strait of Hormuz Can’t be Taken by Force

FILE PHOTO: Strait of Hormuz map is seen in this illustration taken April 15, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Strait of Hormuz map is seen in this illustration taken April 15, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

The debate over reopening the Strait of Hormuz represents one of the most sensitive issues in politics and security. As questions continue to grow about why US President Donald Trump did not take practical steps to remove the obstacles blocking the vital passageway, this discussion sheds light on the nature of the military challenges that make any attempt to open it by force extremely dangerous, especially given the presence of non traditional threats such as naval mines and warfare.

The answer as to why nothing has been done to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is simple, according to The Independent.

As his advisers will have told Trump before he attacked Iran, it is almost impossible to clear a passage through a minefield when the shoreline is held by the enemy, without being prepared to take significant casualties. And this, it seems, the US is not prepared to do.

It is one thing to bomb a less technologically sophisticated enemy from the air, but quite another to get involved in a real fight at sea level with an opponent who has been planning this form of asymmetric warfare for a very long time.

 

A satellite image shows a fleet of small boats at sea, north of the Strait of Hormuz near the Kargan coast, Iran, April 22, 2026. European Union/Copernicus Sentinel-2/Handout via REUTERS

According to the British newspaper, history gives a stark lesson on why America needs to tread warily – a page from the First World War.

It was March 1915. The “straits” concerned were the Dardanelles – the narrow passage linking the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and giving access to Istanbul. The Turks were the defenders, the British and the French the attackers.

They were in the middle of a shooting war. A vital waterway, which would normally be open for the world’s commerce, was closed because of the actions of Türkiye, the bordering power. The coastline was heavily defended, and there was a high probability that mines had been laid to block the channel.

A decision was made by the British and French that the straits were to be reopened by force – and a very considerable force was assembled for that purpose.

It comprised no fewer than 14 “capital” ships (in those days “battleships” and “battlecruisers”) supported by escorts and a large force of minesweepers.

The plan was a good one. The capital ships would stand off in clear water and bombard the shore defenses. When these had been silenced, the minesweepers would go ahead and sweep another clear area.

The capital ships would then move forward again into swept water and recommence their bombardment – successive waves of big ships moving up, but always into water which had been swept for mines. In this way, the whole channel would be cleared, and the straits reopened.

The big push commenced on 18 March 1915. To start with, it all went well. Four capital ships – HM ships Queen Elizabeth, Agamemnon, Lord Nelson and Inflexible – formed the first attacking line.

The second line was composed of four French ships, Gaulois, Charlemagne, Bouvet and Suffren. They, in turn, were to be supported by six more British ships – HM ships Ocean, Irresistible, Albion, Vengeance, Swiftsure and Majestic – which would form a third line to pass through and relieve the French in line two.

The bombardment was started by the RN ships in line one at 11am. By 12.20pm, the French ships of line two had steamed through the first line to take up their advanced positions.

By 1.45pm, the fire from the shore batteries had slackened under the onslaught of the guns of the eight capital ships, and it was deemed safe enough to send in the minesweepers for the next phase. The third line of six ships was also called up to move the force forward.

However, 15 minutes later, everything started to go wrong. FS Bouvet hit a mine, and in a matter of minutes, she capsized and sank. There were only 75 survivors out of a ship’s company of 718.

The action continued. HMS Irresistible of the third wave was bombarding the forts when she, in turn, struck a mine at 3.14pm. She developed a severe list but continued with the action until she hit another mine, and her main engines were put out of action completely.

An attempt was made to take her in tow, but the situation was hopeless, and the order was given to abandon ship. More than 600 men were taken to safety.

 

The Epaminondas ship is seen during seizure by the Revolutionary Guard Corps in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran, in this image obtained by Reuters on April 24, 2026. Meysam Mirzadeh/Tasnim/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Meanwhile, shortly after 4pm, HMS Inflexible struck a mine. She remained capable of steaming slowly and was ordered to withdraw. However, she had a 30ft x 26ft hole below the waterline and had to be beached to save her from sinking. She was later towed to Malta for repairs and was out of action for three months.

After these disasters, Vice-Admiral John de Robeck, the British admiral in charge of the Allied naval forces during the crucial stages of the campaign, finally decided that the waters which had been considered to be safe and swept of mines were anything but.

Accordingly, at 5.50pm, less than seven hours into the operation, he signalled a “General Recall” to withdraw the ships and return to the safe waters outside the straits.

Fifteen minutes later, at 6.05pm, HMS Ocean struck another mine, developed a major list and was deemed not to be capable of being saved. The ship’s company were taken off and she was left to her fate. Both Irresistible and Ocean later sank.

Fourteen major warships had attempted to force the straits. Within four hours, three of them had been sunk and one had been so badly damaged that she was out of action.

This one day of disaster was the end of trying to take the Dardanelles passage by solely naval means. The attempt was never repeated.