Rifaat, in his late 80s, was brother to Assad’s father, the late president Hafez al-Assad, and led elite forces that crushed a 1982 Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama, killing more than ...

Rifaat al-Assad, known as the “Butcher of Hama” for overseeing the violent suppression of a rebellion in the 1980s, has been accused of war crimes by Swiss prosecutors. Rifaat al-Assad ...

HAMA, Syria — For more than four decades, the Assad family made sure that the horrors it committed here stayed unspeakable — killing tens of thousands of Hama residents over a savage month ...