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Staff were expected to work up to 48 hours on the trot, and even sleep in the office. “She was very English and seemed to want to have nothing to do with Syria,” said a family friend.įew were surprised when she landed a job at J.P.
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On visits to Damascus with her parents she’d spend her time by the pool at the Sheraton hotel. No one remembers her showing any interest in the Middle East. She did a degree in computer science at King’s College London, where both friends and detractors recall her as clever and hard-working. As a teenager Asma went to one of Britain’s oldest private girls’ schools, Queen’s College, a few doors down from her father’s private medical practice in Harley Street. She seemed destined for a life among London’s monied elite. “You’d be hard-pressed to recognise her as a Syrian,” a neighbour recalled. At her local Church of England primary school Asma was known as Emma. Friends describe the family as culturally conservative but eager for their children to assimilate. The family remained religious in exile: her father attended Friday prayers and her mother discarded her hijab only after Asma married. Bashar's father, Hafez Assad, was part of the plot, and declared himself leader in 1970.Īsma’s parents arrived in London in the 1970s in search of better opportunities. Like most Syrians her parents are Sunni Muslims, the dominant group in Syria until the 1960s, when a small, marginalised sect called the Alawites staged a coup. Asma Akhras was born in 1975 in Acton, a nondescript pocket of west London bordering far wealthier neighbourhoods. It was an unlikely beginning for a dictator’s wife. Asma Assad has certainly come a long way from the pebble-dash, semi-detached house in London where she was raised. There are now whispers that she could one day succeed her husband as president. Last year the American government described Asma as one of Syria’s “most notorious war profiteers”. Where will the journey end? Her ascendance in the court of the Assads is no longer just fodder for gossiping Syria watchers. “She was very English and seemed to want to have nothing to do with Syria” Morgan banker cutting late-night deals the glamorous First Lady who thought social reform and sharp tailoring would modernise a pariah state the Marie Antoinette of Damascus, shopping as her country burned mother to the nation, battling cancer while her husband’s troops crushed insurgents. Her journey to supremacy over this devastated land has been a winding one, and the road is littered with her many incarnations: a J.P. Throughout the Arab world the hopeful dreams of a decade ago have been crushed, but nowhere more bloodily than in Syria.Īsma, however, is more powerful than she has ever been. Iran and Turkey, as well as America and Russia, have fought proxy battles for influence on Syrian soil. Half the population have fled their homes, precipitating the greatest refugee crisis since the second world war. The regime’s forces have killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, and tortured more than 14,000 people to death.