Assad studied medicine at the University of Damascus and graduated as a general practitioner in 1988. He then trained to become an ophthalmologist at a Damascus military hospital and in 1992 moved to London to continue his studies. In 1994 his older brother, Basil, who had been designated his father's heir apparent, was killed in an automobile accident, and Bashar returned to Syria to take his brother's place. He trained at a military academy and eventually gained the rank of colonel in the elite Presidential Guard. On June 18, 2000, after the death of his father on June 10, Assad was appointed secretary-general of the ruling Baʿth Party, and two days later the party congress nominated him as its candidate for the presidency. The national legislature approved the nomination, and on July 10, running unopposed, Assad was elected to a seven-year term.

As president, Assad announced that he would not support policies that might threaten the dominance of the Baʿth Party, but he slightly loosened government restrictions on freedom of expression and the press. He also emphasized the need to modernize the country's economy, which had been mostly government-controlled and was heavily dependent on oil exports. In early 2005, after the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, Assad—under pressure from Western and Arab nations—committed to the removal of Syrian troops and intelligence services from Lebanon, where Syrian forces had been stationed since a 1976 military intervention. Although a United Nations investigation appeared to indicate some level of Syrian participation in the assassination of Hariri, the involvement of the Assad administration was not conclusively determined in 2006, and the investigation continued.

Though reform hopes for Assad's first term had been met mainly with cosmetic changes, minor progress had been made with economic reforms. In 2007 Assad was reelected by a nearly unanimous majority to a second term as president through elections generally received by critics and opponents as a sham. At the start of Assad's second term, Syria's capacity for meaningful political change remained yet to be seen.