A Damascus court has sentenced Ahmed Badreddine Hassoun, Syria's grand mufti under the Assad regime, to life imprisonment on charges of intentional incitement to murder, direct participation in killings, and fanning sectarian and racial hatred. Hassoun, now 77, was present in court on Monday, 24 August 2026, to hear the verdict — making him the tenth senior official of the former regime to be convicted by Syria's new authorities.

Hassoun served as grand mufti — the highest religious authority in the country, responsible for issuing Islamic rulings on matters of law and governance — for more than sixteen years after his appointment by President Bashar al-Assad in 2005. The role, which formally carried significant religious weight, was in practice used to furnish Assad's actions with Islamic legitimacy. Hassoun publicly endorsed the use of barrel bombs, improvised explosive devices dropped from aircraft onto civilian neighbourhoods in areas that rose up against Assad's rule, earning him the nickname "the mufti of the barrel bombs." He also voiced support for Russian and Iranian military involvement in the civil war, which is estimated to have killed more than half a million people and displaced millions more. The presiding judge found that Hassoun's pronouncements had "justified the use of barrel bombs that caused widespread destruction against civilian targets, in violation of international humanitarian law."

In court, Hassoun argued that he had remained in his post in order to "help people," claiming to have secured the release of detainees held by the Assad regime without seeking payment. Witnesses called by the court contradicted this account, testifying that his interventions were conditional on financial compensation. After Assad fled Syria in December 2024 — when the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) swept into Damascus, ending 54 years of Assad family rule — Hassoun went into hiding before resurfacing publicly. He was arrested at Damascus International Airport in March 2025 while attempting to leave the country, saying he was travelling to Oman for a medical procedure. Notably, Hassoun was the first Sunni Muslim from the Assad era to stand trial under the current Syrian government.

The verdict arrives weeks after a Syrian court sentenced the former president himself, Bashar al-Assad, to death in absentia for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and days after his cousin Wassim al-Assad received a death sentence for forming armed groups responsible for deadly attacks near Damascus. Those capital sentences have drawn criticism from the United Nations and human rights organisations including Human Rights Watch, which oppose the death penalty and are pressing Syria's new authorities to build a transitional justice process centred on victims' rights. "To advance justice for the litany of grave crimes committed in Syria, pronouncing convictions is not enough — a system capable of delivering competent, impartial and independent justice must be put in place," said Balkees Jarrah, director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa division. Questions also persist about the overall fairness and scope of the trials, including which former officials will ultimately face prosecution and under what standards.