What now for Asma al-Assad – the former British public schoolgirl turned international pariah

What must Asma al-Assad be thinking right now? Bright, beautiful and British-born, she could be living an affluent life in England, with friends, family and a fine career, had she not sold her soul to the devil. As it is, she is an international pariah, the wife of a monster responsible for more than half a million deaths, and she faces – along with her three children – the very real prospect of spending the rest of her days in joyless exile in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

She still has a British passport, and could theoretically return to London with her children, albeit not to anything remotely resembling the life she might have had. But even if the government admitted her, Asma would be forced to leave her husband, because he would be arrested on the spot should he ever touch foot in the UK. And whether still with him or not, it seems certain she would be universally scorned for her links to Bashar given the egregious brutality and repression meted out by his government.

Asma might even actually face arrest herself, too, the Metropolitan Police having in 2021 opened a preliminary investigation into allegations that she incited and aided war crimes committed by the Assad regime’s forces during Syria’s protracted civil war.

This, then, is the price she is paying for the Faustian bargain she struck when she married Bashar back in 2000 – when she turned her back on her privileged, liberal Western upbringing and proceeded gradually to morph from being Syria’s equivalent of Princess Diana into its Marie Antoinette.

Asma cannot invoke a deprived childhood in mitigation. She grew up in a spacious, 1930s, pebble-dashed terraced home on a peaceful middle-class street off the A40 in Acton, West London. She is the daughter of Fawaz Akhras, a respected Harley Street cardiologist, and Sahar, a former Syrian diplomat. Both parents are Sunni Muslims from Homs – the sect and the city which would suffer the worst of Bashar’s barbarity.

Asma went from a local Church of England primary school, where she was called Emma, to Queen’s College, a private girl’s school in Marylebone, then King’s College London where she gained a first in computer science.

A glittering career lay ahead of her. She joined Deutsche Bank, and later the investment bank J.P.Morgan for whom she worked in London, Paris and New York as a mergers and acquisitions expert for three years. Then, in 1992, Bashar arrived in London to study ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital in Marylebone.

The pair already knew each other, having met during her family’s trips back to Syria when she was a girl, but they became close during the year Bashar – ten years older than Asma – spent in London.

At that time neither of them thought Bashar would succeed his father, Hafez Assad, as president. His older brother, Bassel, was being groomed for the role. But one foggy day in 1994, Bassel crashed his Mercedes on the road to Damascus airport and was killed. Bashar was summoned home as heir apparent, and duly “elected” Syria’s president when his father died in June 2000.

He married Asma with minimal publicity six months later, on the final day of the year, but she was not a popular choice within Assad’s Alawite family. She was not only a Sunni, but liberal, westernised and independent.

For three months she travelled incognito around a country she scarcely knew, learning about its culture, traditions and problems. She embraced progressive causes. She and her husband, whom she affectionately called “duck”, chose to live not in his father’s palace, but in a Damascus apartment. They sent their children – Hafez, Zein and Karim – to a nearby Montessori school, drove themselves around the city and ate in its restaurants.

Assad’s family resented her growing popularity, but she was useful to the new president. Bashar was seeking to improve Syria’s international image following his father’s brutal dictatorship, and his young, educated, glamorous wife – the antithesis of the usual Arab leader’s veiled spouse – was the perfect foil.

The Syrian First Couple were received by then-French President Jacques Chirac at the Elysee Palace in 2001, by Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in 2002, and by the King and Queen of Spain in 2004. She charmed world leaders at Pope John-Paul II’s funeral in 2005, and welcomed stars like Sting, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to Damascus.

The Sun called her “the sexy Brit bringing Syria in from the cold”. Paris Match, a French language magazine, described her as “an element of light in a country full of shadows”. Days before the Syrian revolution erupted in March 2011, a gushing Vogue article headlined “A Rose in the Desert” called her “the freshest and most magnetic of First Ladies”.

In truth the social, political and economic liberalisation that Bashar supposedly ushered in was always a bit of an illusion, one burnished by expensive western PR companies. He had, for example, supported the Sunni insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq in the early 2000s, and is widely regarded to have approved the assassination of Rafic Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, in 2005.

But the uprising of 2011 exposed the so-called “Damascus Spring” for the sham it was. It began when local security forces beat and tortured fifteen boys in the town of Deraa for painting anti-regime graffiti on a wall, then violently suppressed a subsequent protest by the townspeople. The protests spread to other towns and cities. The regime sought to crush those too, and Syria was swiftly engulfed in a civil war of appalling savagery.

In the subsequent 13 years, nearly 600,000 Syrians have been killed, and six million forced to flee the country. Assad has imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands of rebels; used chemical weapons, Scud missiles and lethal barrel bombs against his own people; and deliberately targeted hospitals, mosques, bakeries and other places where ordinary citizens gather. Countless towns and cities have been reduced to rubble.

Initially, Asma said nothing. Once so accessible to the media, she stopped giving interviews or speeches. Some apologists thought she might be in a state of denial, duped by the regime’s repeated claims that the insurgents were a bunch of foreign-backed jihadist terrorists. Others suggested she was a de facto prisoner of her husband’s regime who was forced to remain silent and barred from leaving the country with the president’s three young children.

That changed ten months into the conflict when she appeared beside her husband at a Damascus rally in a tacit show of support.

Two months after that Syrian opposition activists obtained a cache of the Assads’ e-mails. They revealed that while her country burned, Asma was secretly buying top-of-the range paintings, furniture, jewellery and Christian Louboutin shoes through intermediaries in Paris and London. To her husband she wrote: “If we are strong together, we will overcome this together…I love you.”

It seemed that she had become seduced by power and wealth. The luxury exposed when the Assad’s opulent Damascus home was looted by jubilant Syrian citizens on Sunday certainly indicates as much.

That same e-mail cache revealed that Asma’s father was meanwhile advising his son-in-law on ways to manipulate the western media as Bashar’s crackdown continued. Put another way, a man who had ostensibly dedicated his career to saving lives appeared to be privately supporting a regime that was busily destroying them on a massive scale. Protests were held outside his Acton home. It was paint-bombed, its garden wall was toppled and its front windows broken.

As the years passed, and the conflict rumbled on, Asma became increasingly robust in her support of her husband’s regime. She posted pictures on social media of her meeting soldiers and their families. She gave interviews not to the western media, but to Russian television – once claiming that she had been offered asylum overseas but flatly rejected it. She also cemented her power as rival members of the Assad family died, fled or were sidelined by her husband.

As the facade around her crumbled, the European Union imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on Asma. In 2020, the US sanctioned her for accumulating “ill-gotten gains at the expense of the Syrian people” and using her “so-called charities” to “consolidate economic and political power”.

The proverbial storm clouds were gathering on more than one front. In 2018, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The following year she announced that she had been cured, but last May she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive cancer of the bone marrow and the blood. And then, last weekend, the 54-year-old Assad dynasty was toppled by an Islamist-led rebel coalition. The life Asma had chosen for herself imploded.

The Assads will not lack for money in their Russian exile (they are said to be worth $2 billion), but whether Asma will ever return to her British homeland remains to be seen. Pat McFadden, a cabinet minister, told the BBC on Monday that she had not asked to do so, and would not speculate on the government’s response if she did.

Meanwhile, her childhood home in Acton stands empty, its curtains drawn and its garden overgrown. Neighbours say Asma’s parents had shuttled to and from Syria throughout the war, but they had not seen her mother since before the Covid pandemic while her father was last seen driving away the weekend before last. “I’ve got a feeling they had some idea the end was nigh,” says James Philpot, head of the street’s neighbourhood watch scheme.

Neither the Akhras’, nor Asma, would be welcomed back. Many Syrians live in the area, and the family are said to have had a strained relationship with their neighbours even before they lost the protection of their powerful relatives in Damascus.

“There are people who have lost loved ones, people who have family in Syria who have been killed or tortured so I can understand the antagonism,” says Philpot. “It’s not open antagonism but they’re just cold-shouldered.” If they moved away “there would be immense relief”.

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