After a 13-year brutal civil war in Syria, longtime tyrant Bashar al-Assad is gone, having fled the capital of Damascus to an unknown location after rebels took control of the city over the weekend.

Emerging reports suggest Assad may be dead after his plane disappeared from flight radar. Alive or dead, his legacy will be forever chained to the countless atrocities he unleashed upon his own people.

Long before he unleashed chemical weapons on his own people, Assad was an unlikely heir to Syria”s dynasty. The soft-spoken ophthalmologist, trained in London and married to a British-Syrian investment banker, was never meant to rule. That destiny belonged to his older brother Bassel, who died in a 1994 car crash, forcing the younger Assad to abandon his medical career and return to Damascus for rapid-fire military training.

When his father Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, the younger Assad inherited a family enterprise built on fear. Despite early promises of reform, that facade quickly shattered in 2011 when pro-democratic protests erupted across Syria.

For more than a decade, Assad orchestrated a campaign of systematic brutality against the Syrian people. His playbook of oppression, pieced together through United Nations investigations, human rights reports, and defector testimony, reveals a regime that turned Syria”s entire security apparatus into a well-oiled instrument of terror.

At the center of Assad”s killing machine sat the “Crisis Cell,” a cabal of high-ranking security chiefs handpicked by the dictator himself in March 2011. Operating from Damascus under then-Chief of General Staff Hassan Ali Turkmani, the Crisis Cell commanded a sprawling network of four intelligence directorates that blanketed Syria: Political Security, Military Intelligence, General Intelligence, and Air Intelligence. Each operated as its own entity of fear and intimidation, granted carte blanche to detain, torture, and execute anyone deemed a threat to Assad”s grip on power.

However, Assad”s architecture of oppression went far deeper than army tanks and soldiers. “Assad”s architecture of oppression reached far beyond tanks and soldiers. He constructed the “People”s Committees” which served as the eyes and ears of the regime. They would mark homes with coded symbols at night signaling which families were to be targeted by security forces. Their most ruthless members were handpicked to form an elite terror squad that would come to be known as the Shabiha.

Meaning “ghosts” in Arabic, the Shabiha reveled in inflicting pain, filming their atrocities to spread fear, and leaving mutilated bodies in the streets as warnings to anyone who dared oppose the regime.

Among Assad”s most heinous crimes against his own people was the repeated use of chemical weapons. The most devastating attack came on August 21, 2013, when regime forces unleashed sarin gas on Eastern Ghouta, a Damascus suburb. The attack killed hundreds of civilians, many of them children who suffocated in their sleep.

Still, Assad wasn”t finished. On April 4, 2017, Syrian warplanes dropped sarin gas on Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province, killing 89 civilians in an attack so brazen it prompted then U.S. President Trump to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria”s Shayrat Airbase. Less than a year later, on April 7, 2018, Assad”s forces struck again in Douma, Eastern Ghouta, using a mixture of chlorine gas and sarin that left dozens dead.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Assad”s campaign of slaughter claimed over half a million lives, including more than 25,000 children. Entire families were erased, ancient communities reduced to rubble, and millions driven from ancestral homes in what stands as one of the bloodiest campaigns of state terror in modern history.