A Damascus criminal court sentenced Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassoun to life imprisonment on Monday, marking one of the most prominent convictions in Syria's ongoing legal reckoning with the Assad era. Hassoun served as Syria's Grand Mufti, the country's highest Sunni Muslim religious authority, from 2005 until 2021, when the position was abolished as part of a restructuring of the state's religious establishment. Throughout Bashar al-Assad's rule, he was widely regarded as one of the senior clerics most closely aligned with the regime.
The conviction followed a trial in which Hassoun faced charges including incitement to violence, justification of killings, encouragement of civil war and sectarian conflict, and exploitation of his religious office to serve the regime's interests. According to the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus, the official religious establishment during the Assad period was systematically mobilized to provide "religious cover" for military and security operations, presenting them as legitimate to the Syrian public.
The court determined that the religious establishment under the regime justified their use of barrel bombs, the crude, improvised explosive devices that became one of the Syrian war's most notorious weapons.
They justified their use of these bombs in civilian areas despite the massive destruction inflicted on the population, a practice the court ruled violated international humanitarian law. This finding earned Hassoun the nickname "the Mufti of the barrels."
