‘Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young and very chic – the freshest and most appealing first ladies.’
Thus began Vogue magazine’s rollicking profile of the “dynamic” presidential wife, calling her a “rose in the desert” who was “on a mission to create a beacon of culture and secularism” in the otherwise troubled region.
Blessed with both brains and beauty, she was apparently a “lean, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytical mind who dressed with sly understatement.” It was March 2011 and Asma was living a dream of sorts.
Born and raised in London, she had married a dashing prince about a decade earlier, in the form of the country’s president, Bashar. Now she split her time between raising their three children and trying to make Syria a trendy holiday destination. Vogue’s trendsetters were sold.
“The first impression of Asma al-Assad is movement: a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles,” they claimed. Furthermore, the fashion magazine added, the lithe young mother eschewed Islamic headscarves, drove her own SUV, wore Christian Louboutin shoes and led a “wildly democratic” household.
Thanks to her hip influence, Syria was not only the ‘safest’ country in the Middle East, but also quickly the trendiest country. She apparently wanted the six million young people to drive this bold modernization process by becoming ‘active citizens’.
Then came the so-called Arab Spring. A few weeks after Asma starred in Vogue’s ‘Power Issue’, her husband’s forces began slaughtering these ‘active civilians’, starting a bloody civil war that would kill 600,000 Syrians and leave millions homeless.
Within a few months, Assad became a byword for human rights violations and the approval of chlorine and sarin gas attacks, along with the rape, kidnapping and torture of opposition activists. On several occasions, the president’s forces besieged entire cities, causing widespread famine and forcing children to eat grass.
Behind a chic image, first lady Asma al-Assad made millions from the war. She was born in the London suburb of Acton in 1975
One of the Assads’ many apartments in Moscow. Today, Asma starts a new life in the Russian capital thanks to one of her few remaining friends in high places: Vladimir Putin
Today, Asma starts a new life in Moscow thanks to one of her few remaining friends in high places: Vladimir Putin.
Like many a story of rise and fall, Asma al-Assad’s story is one of greed, vanity and grotesque entitlement, culminating in an orgy of violence and destruction that has earned her a place at husband Bashar’s right hand at the top. table of modern war criminals.
It starts in the London suburb of Acton, where she was born in 1975. Father Fawaz Akhras was a Syrian cardiologist who worked in Harley Street. Mother Sahar was a diplomat at the country’s embassy.
Although her parents came from a conservative Muslim background, Asma had a secular education at Queen’s College, Marylebone, where fees today are almost £9,000 per term (friends called her ‘Emma’), followed by King’s College London, from which she graduated in 1996 . with a degree in computer science and French literature.
She worked briefly at Deutsche Bank in New York before joining Morgan Stanley in the City, when her romance with Bashar ended her banking career prematurely.
They met in London in the early 1990s, when the second son of Syrian dictator Hafez was a lanky medical student studying to become an ophthalmologist. They became an item in 2000 after being reunited when Asma went on holiday to her aunt’s house in Damascus. They married that year; she was 25 and her husband ten years older.
By then, Bashar’s prospects had changed significantly, thanks to the death in a car accident of his brother Bassel, who had been the intended heir of the country’s president.
When Hafez, who ruled with an iron fist for 30 years, died later that year, Bashar took over the presidency in a mock election in which his name was the only one on the ballot and received 99.74 percent of the votes.
Asma married a dashing prince in the form of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
The Englishwoman who was once a ‘rose in the desert’ but is now better known as the ‘first lady of Hell’ started her new life in exile this week, in a gilded cage, writes Guy Adams
Initially, the couple paid lip service to reforming the country. With the help of a posh American PR agency, Brown Lloyd James, Asma embarked on an effort to turn her home country into a center of culture, building huge art galleries and cultural parks.
Celebrities flocked to Damascus, including Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Sting and Damon Albarn. The EU and the UN were charmed, international money started pouring in.
But behind the modern facade, the Assads were old-fashioned dictators who tolerated no political dissent and had little time for freedom of speech or other Western frills.
When the Civil War broke out, they hired the pugnacious London law firm Carter Ruck to write furious letters to newspapers whose coverage of family affairs had displeased them.
Then came news of chemical weapons attacks, along with reports of broader human rights abuses – some 13,000, including some children, were tortured and murdered in Sednaya prison between 2011 and 2015 – gradually turning Asma and her husband into international pariahs.
When the balloon went up, the ‘rose in the desert’ article was removed from the internet by Vogue, with Asma becoming famous as a kind of modern-day Marie Antoinette, shopping while her country burned.
In 2012, thousands of emails hacked by WikiLeaks revealed that she had spent £250,000 on 130 pieces of furniture in the first year of the conflict. To avoid sanctions, she sent her hairdresser to Dubai shopping and used an alias when ordering from Harrods.
She wrote to a fixer in London, jokingly calling herself the “real dictator” in the Assad household, asking for everything from the latest Harry Potter book to a pair of crystal-studded Louboutin stilettos worth £5,000.
Fueling the shopping spree was a grotesque irony: the civil war in Syria turned out to be great news for Asma’s bank balance.
With humanitarian aid pouring into the district, UN agencies and aid organizations were forced to deal with a charity of its own founding, the Syria Trust, if they wanted to deliver supplies through Assad-held areas.
In 2017, more UN funds were channeled through the charity than any other Syrian organization, putting the first lady at the head of an extensive network of patronage. In imposing sanctions on Asma in 2020, the US government called her one of Syria’s “most notorious war profiteers.”
By then, Asma was once again being used as a propaganda tool by Assad’s state media after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Her treatment (she “patriotically” went to hospitals in Syria instead of seeking care abroad) was prominently featured on the presidency’s social media channels. Earlier this year it was announced that she had been diagnosed with leukemia.
Although the war may have ended in the destruction of her precious reputation, Asma remains immensely wealthy. The US estimates the family is worth $2 billion, with their wealth hidden in numerous offshore tax havens and real estate portfolios.
Some of that has been used to buy at least 18 luxury apartments in the City of Capitals complex, located in Moscow’s glittering skyscraper district, where eldest son Hafez has been studying for a doctorate. This is where the Englishwoman who was once a ‘rose in the desert’ but is now better known as the ‘first lady of Hell’ started her new life in exile this week, in a gilded cage.