Rifaat al-Assad has finally done the one thing he spent eighty-eight years avoiding: he has faced a judgment he could not bribe, exile, or shell into submission. The younger brother of the late dictator Hafez al-Assad, and the monstrous uncle to the current tyrant Bashar, has died. One imagines the underworld is currently undergoing a hostile takeover, or perhaps a sudden rezoning of its torture chambers to better reflect the specific architectural brutalism favored by the Assad dynasty. To call Rifaat a 'controversial figure'—as the polite obituaries in the terrified press might attempt—is to commit a linguistic crime on par with calling the sinking of the Titanic a 'boating mishap.' Rifaat was not controversial; he was a catastrophe in human form, a man whose résumé was written in the blood of his own countrymen and punctuated by the artillery fire that leveled the city of Hama.

Let us strip away the diplomatic varnish and look at the grotesque reality of this man’s existence. In 1982, facing an Islamist uprising in Hama, Rifaat did not opt for police action or targeted arrests. That would have been too pedestrian for a man of his theatrical cruelty. As the commander of the Defense Companies—a praetorian guard that functioned less like a military unit and more like a uniformed death squad—he encircled the city and simply erased it. The estimates of the dead range anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 civilians. It is a statistical margin of error that contains entire generations of families. He turned Hama into a parking lot of rubble and bones, setting a terrifying precedent that his nephew Bashar would studiously apply to the rest of the country three decades later. Rifaat was the architect of the scorched-earth policy; Bashar merely franchised it.

But the true tragedy of Rifaat al-Assad’s life is not merely what he did in Syria, but what the West allowed him to do afterward. This is where the story shifts from a Middle Eastern tragedy to a European farce of the highest order. After a failed coup attempt against his brother Hafez in 1984—a squabble over the family business of oppression—Rifaat was not executed. He was not imprisoned. He was paid off. He was given a golden parachute that would make a Wall Street CEO blush, funded entirely by the pillaged coffers of the Syrian state.

And where did this Butcher go to enjoy his retirement? Did he flee to a bunker in a rogue state? No. He went to Paris. He went to London. He went to Marbella. For over thirty years, the man who ordered the slaughter of tens of thousands lived in the lap of luxury in the very heart of Western democracy. He amassed a property empire worth hundreds of millions of euros, buying townhouses in Mayfair and palaces in France, while the chattering classes of Europe spoke politely about human rights at cocktail parties funded, indirectly, by the same systems that produced men like him. The hypocrisy is so thick one could cut it with a guillotine. European governments watched him spend stolen money, accepted the tax revenue, and allowed him to hold court like a deposed king rather than a fugitive war criminal.

It was only recently, in a fit of belated and largely performative morality, that the French judicial system decided that perhaps—just perhaps—it was untoward to harbor a man convicted of money laundering and embezzlement of Syrian state funds. A four-year prison sentence was handed down, a punishment so laughably inadequate for a man of his history that it feels like a punchline. But Rifaat, slippery to the end, did not see the inside of a French cell. He simply went home. In 2021, facing incarceration, he was allowed to return to Syria, embraced by the nephew whose inheritance he once tried to steal. It was the closing of the circle: the prodigal monster returns, not to face justice, but to die in his own bed, surrounded by the remnants of the regime he helped solidify.

So, Rifaat is dead. He died of natural causes, a privilege he denied to tens of thousands of people in Hama. There is no justice here. There is no moral lesson. The Hague did not get him. The French courts moved with the speed of a tectonic plate and missed him. The victims of 1982 received no closure, only the sight of their tormentor living a life of opulent decadence for four decades. We are left only with the bitter realization that in the theater of geopolitics, the villains often exit not with a bang, but with a peaceful last breath, leaving the rest of us to sweep up the ashes.