Arab media have reported that Rifaat al-Assad, the uncle of Syria’s former regime leader Bashar al-Assad and a former senior official of the country’s Baathist regime, has died.
According to reports, Rifaat al-Assad played a key role during the Baathist regime in the bloody bombardments of Syria’s Hama province and in the massacre of thousands of civilians.
Sources also stated that he ordered the mass execution of hundreds of detainees in the prison of the Syrian city of Tadmur (Palmyra).
It is worth noting that during the rule of Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, in the 1980s, tens of thousands of people were martyred and thousands more were forcibly disappeared in Hama, Syria.