Overthrown Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma start a humiliating new life in Russia

Assad has been granted asylum in Russia at the personal direction of Vladimir Putin, who for years helped him cling to power. Now Putin will shield him from justice.

“Of course, such decisions cannot be made without the head of state,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of Putin’s choice to grant Assad asylum.

“It is his decision.”

Peskov said Putin was not planning to meet with Assad, whose usefulness as a client and proxy for Russia in the Middle East is now, it’s fair to say, utterly spent.

Assad has been joined, in his escape from Syria, by his British-born wife, Asma, and their three adult children Zein, Hafez and Karim.

The abandonment of their familiar palaces, and freedom of movement, for what amounts to a gilded prison in Russia is hardly the worst fate imaginable. Life for the couple once described so very colourfully as “the devil and his wife” should continue to be comfortable enough.

But it represents a humbling loss of power for the family that had, until a few days ago, ruled Syria for more than five decades.

Homeless billionaires

An immediate priority, for the Assads, will be to retain as much control as possible over their stupendous wealth. They are, after all, accustomed to a certain lifestyle.

The exact scale of their fortune is hard to discern. The American State Department had a stab at it in 2022, coming up with an “inexact” estimate of $US2 billion (about $3 billion).

In a report to US Congress, the department said the Assads’ assets were “spread out and concealed in numerous accounts, real estate portfolios, corporations and offshore tax havens”. Their assets outside Syria itself were overwhelmingly held under “false names” or “by other individuals” to obscure their true ownership, and thus avoid seizure or sanctions.

The department described a complex “patronage system”, inside Syria, which allowed both Bashar and Asma to “exert significant influence over much of” the nation’s wealth.

The pair created a network of “shell companies and corporate facades” to let them access money via “seemingly legitimate corporate structures and non-profit entities”.

They also laundered money acquired from “illicit economic activities, including smuggling, arms trading, drug trafficking, and protection and extortion rackets”.

Asma, as Syria’s first lady, was no mere bystander to, or beneficiary of, her husband’s corruption. Rather, she was deeply, actively involved in “cultivating a network” to stockpile their riches.

“These networks penetrate all sectors of the Syrian economy,” the department said. It added that Asma had gradually, over the years, built up her influence over Syria’s central economic committee, as well as its non-profit and telecommunications sectors.

If anything, the State Department’s estimate could actually be a lowball number, limited as it was by access to publicly available information, and by the Assads’ efforts to obscure the full extent of their wealth. The Saudi Arabian newspaper Elav has suggested they really have – well, had, at this point – access to 200 tons of gold and $US16 billion ($25 billion).

If true, those figures would mean the family’s various assets are worth about twice as much as Syria’s entire GDP.

Of course, given just how much of the Assads’ money is tied to the Syrian economy, their escape to Russia will have severed a significant chunk of it. Hence the need to consolidate what they can, before it is cut off for good.

But some of their assets are in Moscow, including a number of luxury apartments.

‘The devil and his wife’

The Syrian civil war began in 2011, after 40 years of the Assads’ rule. Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, became president in 1971, and never relinquished power. Bashar took over when his father died in 2000.

Asma married Bashar that same year, having met him in Britain, where she graduated from King’s College in London with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and French literature in 1996. She left an investment banking career to join her husband in Syria.

She is currently suffering from an aggressive form of leukaemia.

 

 

It was Asma’s glamour that gave her husband something of a PR lifeline in 2011, when it was much-needed, and the war was still in its early stages.

At that point, the influential American magazine Vogue published an extraordinarily soft article focused on the Syrian first lady headlined, I kid you not, A Rose in the Desert.

Keep in mind: the Assad regime was already autocratic and oppressive before the war, in which it would eventually murder thousands upon thousands of its own country’s civilians, including with illegal chemical weapons.

That government was, in Vogue’s view, fertile ground for a puff piece.

“We don’t want any politics, none at all,” the magazine’s editor told the article’s author, Joan Juliet Buck, when assigning the story in question (that is according to Ms Buck’s later account of what happened).

“She only wants to talk about culture, antiquities, and museums.”

The article, which you will not find online because it was deleted within weeks of being published, called the Assads “wildly democratic”, among other things.

“Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic – the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies,” it said.

“Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment.

“She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement.

“Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s website says, ‘the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors’.”

And so forth. All very complimentary.

Still, Ms Buck did get sit-down time with both Bashar and Asma al-Assad in December of 2010, which gave her a level of insight into the couple that few Western journalists, in recent years, can match.

Subsequently, writing in Newsweek, she gave her unvarnished view.

“I met the devil and his wife,” Ms Buck said of the Assads.

She went on to describe Asma as “the first lady of hell”.

Bashar al-Assad and his wife will now live, in Russia, with the sort of luxury most people in this world would find too preposterous to even bother dreaming of.

But look at their trajectory, here. Within the space of a few weeks, they’ve gone from being an all-powerful glamour couple, free to milk their country for every selfish penny, to pariahs and exiles, trapped under the rule of a ruthless benefactor to whom they owe their comfort and, arguably, their lives.

No more hobnobbing. No more summits. No more pretence that they’re anything other than criminals, unwelcome in any nation that upholds international law.

It’s a terminal humiliation. May whatever comforts are brought, by whatever remnants of their wealth they can salvage, be empty.

Twitter: @SamClench