Syria - Personal background

Bashar al-Assad was born on 11 September 1965 in Damascus. There, he was educated at the French-Arab al-Hurriyet school and continued on to medical school, specializing in ophthalmology. In 1988, he enrolled in the Tishrin Military Hospital in Damascus; he graduated in 1992, after which he moved to the United Kingdom to further his medical studies, where he was in 1994 when his elder brother Basil was killed in an automobile accident. After returning to Syria, he was installed in the military and quickly rose through its ranks. Assad has traveled widely in the West and speaks fluent English, French, and Arabic. Bashar is chairman of the Syrian Computer Society, a loose coalition of business executives in the technology sector and government officials who seek to increase Syria's connectedness to the global information infrastructure.