A Syrian court ​sentenced ousted leader Bashar al-Assad to death on Tuesday after a trial in absentia, convicting him of crimes including killings, torture, and arbitrary arrest ‌during the country's nearly 14-year war.

It was the first Syrian conviction against Assad, who was ousted in a rebel offensive in December 2024 that ended decades of his family’s iron-fisted rule over Syria, and the brutal war that killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

Syrians gathered around the court in Damascus, chanting, clapping and waving the Syrian flag as news of the sentences spread.

Assad fled the capital Damascus as rebel fighters closed ​in nearly two years ago, and is currently in Russia, where he and his family were granted asylum on humanitarian grounds.

Security Official Tried in Person

In a trial of ​former government officials on Tuesday, a judge handed down a death sentence to the former president over the crimes of “premeditated and intentional murder ⁠of more than one person and of children, torture, arbitrary arrest and crimes against humanity”.

The judge issued the same sentence in absentia to Assad’s brother Maher, who headed the ​fearsome Fourth Armoured Division, which was responsible for crackdowns on protests, recapturing Syrian territory on behalf of Assad and was accused of spearheading the production and trade of drugs to enrich Assad.

A ​death sentence was also handed down to Atef Najib, an Assad-era security official in the southern province of Deraa, where the first protests against Assad erupted in 2011.

Najib, a cousin of the Assads, was detained by Syrian security forces in early 2025 and was the only accused to be tried in person.

Celebrations and Some Scepticism

In Deraa, crowds also gathered to celebrate and carried pictures of people arrested or killed ​during the war, including ones of Hamza al-Khatib, a 13-year-old boy who activists said was arrested by Syrian security forces, then tortured and killed.

Noha al-Masri, a prosecutor present at ​Tuesday’s sentencing, lost her own brother in a crackdown on a Deraa protest in 2011.

“The ruling that came, as we expected, was as big as the sacrifices that Syrians gave for 15 years, as ‌big as the suffering of the families and relatives of the martyrs,” Masri told Reuters.

The sentencing follows a nearly four-month trial process, billed by Syria’s new Islamist-led authorities as a sign the country was prioritising transitional justice to move away from Assad’s rule.

However, some said the death sentence would diminish any chance of Assad and his fellow defendants being repatriated to face justice in their home country.

“There is a huge problem, which is that no one will hand over a criminal to a country that issues a death sentence. This will cut off the ​road to Assad, and many other criminals, ​being handed over to Syria,” said Anwar al-Bunni, head of the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research.

“This is performative justice, not transitional justice,” Bunni told Reuters.

Ousted in Lightning Offensive

Assad, who was born in 1965, became president in 2000 after his father Hafez died.

He maintained the family’s rule and the dominance of ​their Alawite sect in the Sunni Muslim-majority country as well as Syria's status as an ally of Russia and Iran while ​hostile to Israel and the US.

Shaped in its early years by the Iraq war and Syria’s military presence in Lebanon, Assad’s rule was defined by the war that spiralled out of the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets, to be met with deadly force by his security forces.

Branded an “animal” in 2018 by US President Donald Trump for using chemical weapons — an accusation he denied — ⁠Assad outlasted ​many of the foreign leaders who believed his demise was imminent in the early days of the conflict, ​when he lost swathes of Syria to rebels.

But in 2024, rebels led by now-President Ahmed al-Sharaa swept across Syria in a lightning offensive that lasted less than two weeks.

Assad already faces an arrest warrant in France over the ​bombing of a press centre in Homs in 2012.

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HED: Meta launches new AI model as Zuckerberg champions open-weight push

DEK: The new model, Muse Glimmer, is smaller than leading ​AI models from rivals and is instead designed to run agentic tasks on a Mac or PC with a single graphics card, ‌aiming to tap demand for AI systems that run directly on people’s devices.

A 3D-printed Meta logo and word “AI” are seen in this illustration created on July 20, 2026.

REUTERS

Aug 10 (Reuters) -

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for lower US barriers for open-source AI to better compete with Chinese rivals as the social media giant released a new open-weight model on Monday and said more would follow soon.

The new model, Muse Glimmer, is smaller than leading ​AI models from rivals and is instead designed to run agentic tasks on a Mac or PC with a single graphics card, ‌aiming to tap demand for AI systems that run directly on people’s devices.

“We’ve got even bigger models that are coming soon,” Zuckerberg said in a video post accompanying his 14-page essay titled “The Future is for Everyone” in which he championed spreading AI rather than leaving it in the hands of a few.

“The notion AI is so dangerous that the only safe ​path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic.”

Zuckerberg’s statement marks the latest show of support for open-weight AI, which is gaining traction as ​businesses grow wary of ballooning AI bills and worry about recent cybersecurity incidents involving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.

Open-weight models are typically cheaper than leading models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. They also come with publicly accessible core components for easy customization, unlike closed models that companies ​keep fully under their control.

Those controls are in the spotlight after Hugging Face, the AI coding collaboration hacked by a rogue OpenAI model, was forced to use a ​Chinese open-weight model to defend against the attack because closed-source models have curbs on cybersecurity use.

Chinese startups are leading the race for open-weight models, with Moonshot’s Kimi K3, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max and DeepSeek’s V4-Flash rivaling the performance of top US systems. By contrast, the leading models from US developers OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google are closed-weight.

Shares of Meta, which have fallen about 10 percent so far this ​year, were up nearly 3% in premarket trading on Monday.

Policy Rethink Needed to Propel Open-Weight

Meta also plans to release the weights of Muse Spark 1.2, its ​most advanced model, built by a costly superintelligence team it formed last year to claw its way back into the AI race.

The company had long supported open models and ‌was among the only US tech firms to release such models before poor reception for its Llama 4 last year forced a change in strategy.

In Monday’s wide-ranging AI essay, Zuckerberg also unveiled a new $1 billion fund that aims to ease fears about the impact of its data-center build-out by offering support to communities.

Growing local opposition to data centers has become a key election issue in the US and one of the biggest hurdles for Big Tech’s push to build the infrastructure needed to ​power AI.

“One significant disadvantage that the US ​has compared to countries like China ⁠is that it is more difficult to build infrastructure here,” Zuckerberg, whose company is set to spend as much as $145 billion this year on AI infrastructure, said.

Zuckerberg also said the US needed to rethink policies if domestic firms were to lead ​in open-weight models, including on data use and distillation - a method that uses the outputs of a powerful AI system to ​train a smaller model that can handle some of the same tasks with far less computing power.

He said that Meta would implement a governance structure to give its independent directors the power to approve the safety criteria for releasing models.

“Foreign labs currently hold several advantages here since American labs have to comply with many additional restrictions on training data,” Zuckerberg ⁠said, referring ​to open-source models.

“US policy must reduce this additional friction if we want American open source models to ​lead over time,” Zuckerberg said, adding that restricting access to foreign open-source models was not an effective solution.

President Donald Trump’s administration told AI developers earlier this month that it will not put open-weight AI models ​through voluntary safety tests, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.