When Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December, the iconography of posters, billboards and statues emblematic of his family’s brutal decades-long grip on the country also came down. The images of Assad ...

Bashar al-Assad, an eye doctor educated in the West, was never his father Hafez' choice to take over from him to preserve the Alawite sect's iron control of Syria. The eldest son, Bassel, had been ...