Ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his family have fled Damascus after Syrian rebels captured the city on Sunday, bringing an end to his cruel dictatorship and nearly six decades of his family’s autocratic rule.
As reports indicate al-Assad has fled to Russia, we take a look at the woman who has stood by his side for the past twenty-five years, the controversial figure Asma al-Assad.
Who is Asma al-Assad?
Born in London in 1975 to a Sunni family from Homs, Asma’s mother Sahar Otri was a diplomat and her father, Fawaz Akhras, was a cardiologist. Asma and her two younger brothers were raised as secular Muslims and spoke Arabic at home.
Asma was educated in the UK, attending Queen’s College before pursuing a degree in computer science and French literature from King’s College London.
According to one journalist who obtained special access to the First Lady in 2010, Asma grew up riding horses and skipped class to spend time with her friends on Oxford Street.
One friend revealed that she’d been called “Emma” during school: “I don’t remember her being referred to as Asma; she was definitely just Emma.”
“She didn’t stand out as a Muslim at all, not like some girls who wore more traditional dress. You wouldn’t have thought she was anything but English, I guess. And I’m not sure I would have singled her out for great things.”
She had a short stint in New York working at Deutsche Bank before returning to London to work as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. She was about to commence an MBA at Harvard when she met the man who would change the course of her life.
Marriage
In 2000, when she was 25-years old, Asma was holidaying at her aunt’s place in Damascus when she met Bashar al-Assad, a family friend. He was 10 years her senior, and had spent the last several years being groomed to become the country’s next leader after initially training as an ophthalmologist.
In July of that year, Bashar had become president of Syria. He was the son of “the worst evil genius in the world”, Hafez al-Assad, who had died from a heart attack a month prior.
Asma travelled to Damascus on weekends to see Bashar, eventually leaving her job at Morgan Stanley to move to Damascus to be with him. In December of that year, the pair married, spurring rumours of a new, progressive Syria that would represent the interests of both the Sunni majority and the Alawite sect, which Bashar was part of.
‘First Lady of Hell’
Asma hired a PR firm to curate her image as an upstanding young president’s wife. She set up charities and organisations for youths and other marginalised groups, including the Syria Trust for Development which claimed to fund humanitarian and developmental initiatives. The trust has been criticised for its ties with Bashar’s regime and its alleged complicity in the government’s abuse of human rights.
Her attempts at curating her self-image included a controversial interview with US Vogue in March 2011, which had, at the time, sought “a description of the good-looking first lady.”
In the article titled A Rose in the Desert, which has since been redacted online and in print, Asma was described as “a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement,” as well as “glamorous, young, and very chic.”
Over a year after the article was published, the journalist behind the profile, Juliet Joan Buck, wrote a personal reflection of her experience putting together the piece, saying: “There was no way of knowing…that I would be contaminated because I had written about the Assads. There was no way of knowing that this piece would cost me my livelihood and end the association I had had with Vogue since I was 23.”
By the end of that year, 2012, the country was heading towards a multi-faceted war. Innocent civilians were being murdered by the masses, as barrel bombs were being dropped into cites and chemical weapons were being released by the state. According to UN estimates, more than 306,000 people were killed and over 6.7 million displaced in the decade between March 2011 and 2021. During this time, Asma al-Assad stood by her husband and remained silent as citizens died of violence, hunger, and poverty.
Few believed she was unaware of her husband’s brutal regime. In 2012, The Guardian published emails leaked from the couple’s private accounts that showed Asma had spent tens and thousands on clothes, “gold and gem-encrusted jewellery, chandeliers, expensive curtains, and paintings to be shipped to the Middle East.”
Even as bombs were killing thousands of innocent civilians, Asma continued to fund her lavish lifestyle, obtaining extravagant material possessions, including a $2,802 vase from Harrods in London and a $4,000 pair of Christian Louboutin crystal-encrusted heels. A 2022 estimate conducted by the US Department of State calculated the family’s net worth to be somewhere between US$1-$2 billion.
In February 2012, she made a statement in an email to the Times newspaper in London, stating that “The president is the president of Syria, not a faction of Syrians and the First Lady supports him in that role.”
In 2016, she gave a rare television interview with a Russian state-backed news channel in which she did not reveal her thoughts about her husband’s atrocities, only admitting that there was “unprecedented” suffering going on.
“There is not a family in Syria that has not lost a loved one,” she said. “Today parents are attending the funerals of their children rather than their weddings.” She added that the severity of the humanitarian crisis in Syria was “beyond comprehension”.
In 2016, Asma was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent treatment. In May this year, the 49-year old was diagnosed with leukemia, drawing a mixed reaction from both the Assad regime supporters and opposition activists.
In recent weeks, as Syrian rebels advanced toward the capital Damascus, Asma and her husband have fled to Moscow with their adult children to be granted political asylum, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.