Syria’s Asma al-Assad: once adored, now abhorred

Asma al-Assad, once ‘a rose in the desert’, is no longer in vogue.

An image from Asma al-Assad’s Instagram account shows her with her husband Bashar al-Assad.

Once upon a time there was a little girl who was known to her friends as Emma, who grew up in a pebbled house in London and went to the finest schools.

Emma’s father was a doctor, her mother a diplomat, and besides being pretty, Emma was bright and everyone agreed she had the world at her feet.

But then, at 25, Emma — real name Asma — met a man who took her to his castle in Damascus. She was smitten, so when he proposed marriage she agreed to become his wife and, in the process, she became first lady of Syria, one of the oldest civilisations on earth.

And the West rejoiced.

Here was a young British woman, at once elegant and poised; a native English-speaker who also spoke Arabic and French; who had worked as a banker in New York; who had been accepted to Harvard; who was interested in the plight of women and girls in the Middle East; who did not cover her hair, and wore stylish trousers.

Surely she was the perfect fusion of Arab and Western ideals?

That was the fairytale.

Now comes the nightmare.

Asma al-Assad, the British-born wife of Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, is now 41 and the mother of three young children. Once so pretty, she is now a repugnant creature, the first lady of hell. As mentioned, her story had started so well: Asma was born in London in 1975 to a Syrian-born cardiologist and his wife, a diplomat who had served as first secretary at the Syrian embassy. She went to Queen’s College, private school, graduated from King’s College London, and worked for a time at JP Morgan in Manhattan.

According to a 2010 Vogue profile, Asma was visiting an aunt in Damascus in the summer before she was due to start an MBA at Harvard when she met Bashar al-Assad, the second son of the old Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad.

He spoke English beautifully and seemed quite modern, having studied in London. But following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, he became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Asma moved to Damascus in November that year, and married Bashar in December. She was 25 and he was 10 years older

Hope springs eternal in the Middle East and in the first few years of her husband’s reign Asma — known for a time as Syria’s Princess Diana — spoke openly of her desire to see a free press in Syria and the flowering of human rights. She worked hard on her image, paying a Western PR company to assist her with the Vogue profile, which described her as “A Rose in the Desert” and as “the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies … with fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green”.

She opened a dialogue with the Louvre in Paris with the aim of one day displaying some of the 500,000 priceless works of art believed to be stored in Syria; and she talked of mapping the ancient artefacts in the Syrian desert.

But her image — oh, so chic and cosmopolitan — took a solid blow in 2011, when her husband began wiping opponents from the map, torturing and gassing them, while she said nothing.

And then when his thugs tortured schoolboys, some as young as 10, who were caught painting anti-government graffiti on an old fence in 2011, she said nothing. And when jails began filling with political prisoners, she said nothing. Last year WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails from her office that made plain what Asma was doing during the violence.

She was shopping online, purchasing 130 pieces of furniture, together worth about $US440,000, including five chandeliers for $US15,000 and 11 ottomans for $US33,000, a round dining table for $US16,000 and a $US17,000 rug, plus linen for two bedrooms, a guestroom, a living room, a dining room and a dressing room, as well as a $US7000 pair of shoes with crystal-encrusted heels. She had the goods shipped to Dubai, presumably to get around sanctions (the EU, like the US, prefers not to deal with Syria). Vogue promptly pulled down its “A Rose in the Desert” profile, and its author, Joan Juliet Buck, was let go.

Buck has since blown the whistle on the whole charade, describing how Asma had “hired a PR firm” to manage her image and that of her tall husband.

“I didn’t know I was going to meet a murderer,” Buck says. “There was no way of knowing that Assad would kill more of his own people than his father had and torture tens of thousands more, many of them children.” And so the rose of the desert — that image of Asma, the caring progressive steeped in Western ideals — is dead. And what remains of Emma?

Her Facebook and Instagram pages — they are apparently managed not by her but by fans — are still updated daily with photographs of Asma clasping the hands of grateful Muslim widows, or sitting with disabled children on her lap, or accepting posies from little girls and clapping along at school concerts.

She remains Paris-thin, but even with her stunning wardrobe — Chanel shift dresses and Louboutin heels and monstrously expensive handbags that bring House of Cards’ Claire Underwood to mind — it is clear that she has grown ugly in the eyes of those who once adored her. Comments include: “Innocent women and children are struggling to breathe and are dying because you support chemical warfare on your own people.” And: “She thinks she’s a fashion icon. She is the poster child for narcissistic evil incarnate.”

And: “You are pure evil. How about the children you killed in the chemical attack? You are as sick as your husband.”

Of course she would see things differently. She would say that her husband is holding back Islamic State and other jihadist hordes and that the fall of his regime would mean carnage, and a worsening situation for women, who would be forced out of schools and universities and into the niqab.

At the same time, the question on her mind as the world grapples with the latest attack on women and children by Assad’s forces must surely be: to what extent will the wife of a brutal dictator — English-born, with a British passport — be held responsible for the evil done by her husband? In a recent interview on the Russia 24 channel, Asma claimed she had been offered “safe passage” out of Syria, but had chosen to stay by her husband’s side (as a UK citizen, she cannot be refused entry to Britain.)

“Yes, I was offered the opportunity to leave Syria, or rather to run from Syria,” she said. “These offers included guarantees of safety and protection for my children and even financial security … but it doesn’t take a genius to know what these people were really after. It was a deliberate attempt to shatter people’s confidence in their President.” And so she stayed.

This is quite a gamble. Asma has been compared online to Marie Antoinette, Eva Braun and Elena Ceausescu; and for none of these women did the fall of their husbands’ regimes end well.

Asma must be hoping history will not repeat itself. But it does, time and time again.

www.carolineoverington.com