The family drama surrounding fallen Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad took a new twist Thursday as his wife was reported to be facing a “50/50″ cancer battle.
The Daily Telegraph of London reported that Asma al-Assad is “severely ill” from acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer which she had been first reported to have fought in May. Her father had told the Daily Beast Monday that she is “receiving the best treatment possible,” but had not suggested the illness was a significant danger to her survival.
The Telegraph reported that Al-Assad, 49, is isolated from her husband and children to avoid infection as she is treated in Moscow, where the dictatorial clan have been given asylum by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The Telegraph’s well-connected correspondent Ben Farmer quoted two sources, one of whom had been talking directly to the al-Assad family “in recent weeks.”
“Asma is dying,” that source said. “She can’t be in the same room with anyone.” The second source, described by The Telegraph as having contact with the al-Assads in Moscow, said, “When leukemia comes back, it’s vicious. She has been 50/50 in the last few weeks.”
The claim that al-Assad is “dying” comes after her father denied to the Daily Beast that she was seeking a divorce from her husband in the wake of his regime collapsing. Dr. Fawaz Akhras told the Beast that these reports were “false,” and also said of her health, “She is receiving the best treatment possible.”
In Syria, the al-Assads’ personal and government properties were ransacked after they fled. / Hussein Malla/AP
Thursday’s report offers new insight into the lead-up to the sudden collapse of the al-Assad regime after five decades of a bloody dictatorship run from Damascus, the last decade spent in an unrelenting civil war in which al-Assad survived only thanks to Russian and Iranian military support while his country divided into regional fiefdoms and saw the rise, then fall, of ISIS.
Asma al-Assad was announced to have had breast cancer treatment in 2019, and then leukemia in May of this year. The Telegraph said she sought treatment first in the United Arab Emirates, which is a U.S. ally but which had not entirely ostracized the al-Assad regime, and then in Moscow. She was already in the Russian capital when her husband made his midnight departure from his palace and fled in secret on a Russian military flight.
The al-Assads, their children and other close relatives are now guests of the Russian state, although relations with Putin are reported to have become chillier. The fall of the regime was a geopolitical blow for Putin. He had turned a former Soviet facility into a modernized Mediterranean naval base at Tartus, and built up a huge airbase inland. Both allowed him to project Russian power in the Middle East and into Africa; both now face an uncertain future.
Claims that Asma al-Assad wanted a divorce first surfaced in Turkish media, with claims that she wanted it to help facilitate a return to her native London. As a British citizen, such a move could not be stopped by its government but would be highly controversial. Her father, a Syrian-born British doctor who had a distinguished medical career, was said by The Telegraph to be part of her treatment, something he had not confirmed to the Daily Beast.
Asma al-Assad, 49, had been brought up in a suburb of London, educated in the city and begun a career in investment banking when she started dating Bashar al-Assad, at the time an eye doctor being trained in London. He returned to succeed his father as dictator after the death of her brother, and Asma became a part of the regime’s PR drive. While his secret police disappeared opponents, she was lauded by Vanity Fair as the “Rose in the Desert,” before protests in 2011 sparked civil war thanks to her husband’s brutal response.
Meanwhile in Syria, the rebel group which ousted al-Assad has held talks with Pres. Joe Biden’s special representative about their future plans after a civil war in which as many as 620,000 people are believed to have died. The al-Assads are hardly the only Syrians who have fled for safety; the United Nations estimates that 5.5 million Syrians now live abroad as a result of the war her husband started.
