With the fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and a new White House on the horizon, Iranian resistance leaders and U.S. lawmakers express hope that Iran will topple its own leadership, with U.S. help.

The United States sees the fall of Bashar al-Assad as an extraordinary chance to rid Syria "once and for all" of chemical weapons that killed or injured thousands of people in its civil war, a senior U.

Bashar Assad instead became a doctor in the 1980s and was studying in London to be an ophthalmologist in the early 1990s. But when Basil Assad died in a car accident in 1994, Bashar Assad was recalled to Syria to replace his brother as heir apparent.