Inside The Fall of Asma al-Assad
The Cousin of Syria's "Lady Macbeth" Gives Me an Exclusive Interview
I am completely fascinated by the story of Asma al-Assad, the British born wife of the Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and brutal dictator who fled into exile in Russia on December 8th.
I’ve kept wondering as we read about the horrors of Assad’s Syria: How did this beautiful, privileged woman who grew up in Acton, a London suburb, and who worked for JP Morgan come to be the Lady Macbeth of the Middle East, someone who is banned from her native Britain, sanctioned by the US and reviled by the West?
She’s only a few years younger than me and some of my closest British friends overlapped with her at JP Morgan.
It’s a conundrum that has sat with me.
So, these past two weeks, I’ve phoned around sources in the Middle East - and in a stroke of luck - I got to Asma’s cousin, Abdu al-Dabbagh, 59. As you might imagine, given Abdu is an Assad relative, he fled Syria in a hurry on Sunday December 8th, hours after Bashar left, and is now residing in a rental home in Beirut, Lebanon.
Abdu is a Syrian “businessman” who tells me he owns some jewelry stores in Dubai. He moved his businesses out of Syria in 2000 because he determined (correctly) very early on in Bashar Assad’s presidency that Assad would appropriate all the private businesses he could to line his own coffers. Bashar’s cousin and uncle were already running a monopoly even then.
Despite the family ties, (Abdu’s mother, Saadat Otri is Asma Assad’s mother’s sister) there is no love lost between him and Bashar Assad, who, he says, put him into solitary confinement in January, where guards peed into his drinking water and onto his blanket - all because he criticized the five “illiterates” running the Syrian economy. He was released he says because he went on a hunger-strike and his mother put pressure on Asma.
And yet fifty years ago Abdu and Bashar were childhood best friends. In the same class. In the same school. And Abdu’s father, Ahmed Adnan Dabbagh, was the Syrian Minister of Intelligence and then the Interior under Bashar’s father, President Hafez Assad, who was an even more tyrannical ruler than his son. Abdu says, that Hafez Bassad crammed the jails so full of people that they were so squashed that the myth spread they had to sleep standing up.
Abdu tells me that contrary to what Bashar al-Assad has said recently from Moscow - that he never planned to flee - that there were definitely clues that he was planning to leave Syria to go into exile the week before December 8th.
For starters, he emptied out the vast “box of the martyr” in the presidential palace and cars stuffed with dollar bills and gold headed to his plane on the tarmac in Damascus. When the plane finally took off, Abdu says that Bashar had $800 million in cash and four tons of gold with him. (The Assad’s wealth has been estimated to be $1.6 billion.)
But on the afternoon of Saturday, December 7th, Assad pretended to be nonchalant. The prime minister went to tell him that rebel forces were on the fringes of Damascus. “Don’t worry,” he said, “let’s deal with that tomorrow.”
But he did not wait for “tomorrow”. Instead, Abdu says that night he got in his blue Volkswagen jeep and his driver took him to the airport. Once there, he phoned Maher-al-Assad, his younger brother, whose role, Abdu says, had been to run the drugs business that, along with prostitution, became mainstays of the Syrian “economy.” “It’s game over,” Bashar told his brother, “You’d better go and escape.” There are arrest warrants for anyone connected to Assad’s regime, Abdu included.
Asma and their three children were already in Russia, where she has been undergoing treatment for leukemia - and where the Assads reportedly own 40 apartments worth $40 million. She had a bone-marrow transplant there in August. It’s likely, says Abdu, that she had already taken plane-loads of gold and currency ahead on previous trips.
Abdu first met his cousin Asma - known in Britain as “Emma” - when she was 40 days old. He was ten and his mother had sent him to London to visit Asma’s father, Fawaz Akhras, a doctor, because he had rheumatic fever. They lived in a $1 million house in a London suburb. Every summer his cousin and her brother and parents came to stay with his family in Syria, where her father banned anyone from speaking English in the house. Arabic was mandatory.
Bashar al-Assad and Abdu were at that point best friends. Bashar was tall, thin, withdrawn and a nerd. And stingy according to Abdu. In 1986 he gave him a gold coin and in 2013 he’d ask for it back.
But back then no one important in Syria was focused on Bashar.
The focus was instead on his older, popular brother Bassel, a good-looking, charismatic soldier, equestrian and race car driver known in Syria as “the golden knight.” Bassel was his father’s natural successor.
But in 1994 Bassel was killed in a car crash en route to Damascus airport. Reportedly, he was driving his Mercedes at around 150 mph without a seatbelt. But there are many - including Abdu - who think the “accident” was no accident. Bassel was a supremely skilled driver. Abdu heard that Bassel was en route to London trying to close out a deal with the British to buy the Typhoon aircraft - and there were plenty of countries, Russia and Israel among them, who did not want this deal to happen. The Typhoon deal died with Bassel.
Bashar was in London training to be an ophthalmologist. He was summoned by his father forthwith to Damascus, and within the hour ‘became the man,” says Abdu. He was now the successor. He joined the military, working his way up to become a colonel.
In 2000 Hafez was dying and he knew his son needed a wife. He wanted to unite the Alawite tribe, his family tribe and a minority in Syria, with the Sunnis and he hand-picked Asma, whose family was Sunni. He’d seen her in the summers and liked the look of her. It was irrelevant that Asma and Bashar barely knew each other.
“What’s he like?” Abdu says she asked him about Bashar. At the time he spoke positively of his then-friend, who he says was a gentleman with women.
Abdu says Asma was then caught between two worlds. She’d been privately educated in London and had a degree in computer science and French literature from Kings College.
She was a budding fast-paced investment banker for JP Morgan, but she was also a conservative muslim, living under her parents’ roof under the expectation that she would soon quit her job and marry. Abdu says there was no possibility of her dating anyone casually. “She could have friends, but no boyfriends.” There were marriage proposals, however - and she turned them all down.
Until Bashar. “Who can refuse the President?” says Abdu. Because by then it was clear Bashar was going to become president.
Hafez was alive and present for the couple’s engagement, but he died in June 10th, before they got married, quietly, in the house. The secrecy, Abdu says, was partly because of Bashar’s low-key style. And partly, because no one wanted any trouble on account of Asma being a Sunni.
That she was not an Alawite, he says, is fundamental to understanding the power structure both among the couple and in the country. Yes, Asma Assad rose to great prominence and power - and evil. But not, Abdu says, withou being made a scapegoat by her husband when it suited him. “An Alwaite cannot curse another Alawite,” Abdu says. “But they can curse a Sunni”.
Initially, he says, she did not have a full understanding of how Syria worked. And obviously she was not in charge of the army, which was the chief weapon of the government. “Bashar believed the only way to show authority was through fear,” he says. “That’s what he was raised to believe.”
At the start of his rule, Bashar appeared to want to point Syria in the direction of a democracy. But the “Damascus Spring,” as it became known, lasted barely a year. Quickly freedom of the press was revoked, opposition politicians were arrested, and meetings of intellectuals were shut down. The war of attrition with Israel in the Golan continued. When the US invaded Iraq, Assad was quick to send in troops of Islamists to attack. And he was blamed for the assassination of Lebanon Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005 - which he denied. (He “absolutely ordered it”, Abdu tells me.) The West demanded he remove his troops from Lebanon as a reprisal.
In 2011 he faced anti-government uprisings from his own people and the crackdowns became more and more brutal. Children and women were indiscriminately executed. In one massacre he killed 5,000 people. And In 2013 it was reported he used chemical weapons on his own people. (Again something he denied. But, again, Abdu says “he ordered it”.)
In 2015 he received help against the rebels from the Russians; but, again the joint Russian-government troops were accused of war crimes and atrocities they denied. “He got more and more aggressive and narcissistic,” Abdu says. “He either thought he was God or that he’d appointed God to His position.”
Asma, meanwhile, posed as his Goddess. She posed for a puff piece in Vogue magazine that was quickly scrubbed - and ran a charity, the Syrian Development Trust, which was supposed to bring food and aid and infrastructure to the Syrian people, 80 percent of whom lived in poverty, many of whom were displaced because of the war.
Ironically, her authority over the Trust was cemented after emails from Bashar to various mistresses were leaked.
The war had brought with it opportunities for Bashar to be away from home and to stray. Cheating became his way of coping with pressure. Abdu says Asma confronted him. It was ugly. But reports that she considered leaving the country with her children are wrong, Abdu says. That was never on the table.
Instead, when tested by various members of her husband’s government - who tried to limit her control over the Trust, she dug down and ring-fenced it. Given her husband’s affairs, it was all she felt she had left, Abdu says. Money was pouring in from everywhere: the UN alone put in over $130 million.
“No one could touch the money in the Trust,” Abdu says.
But the reports started to spread that the money was not going to help starving, homeless Syrians. It was in fact going to line the coffers of the regime and the Assads. Further, the economy was put into the hands of five close friends of Bashar’s and the intelligence apparatus spread the word, that they were appointed by Asma, who was now sitting in on government and NGO meetings. The word spread she was really the one in charge. After all, she had the brains and the financial know-how. She acquired the moniker: “Lady Macbeth”.
In 2018, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and stepped back from public life. Abdu urged her in a private meeting at his mother’s house to use the opportunity of her absence to highlight the fact that the monopoly on the economy was continuing - without her.
He says he told her: “Bashar is abusing your name. He is using you as a scapegoat. Everyone in Syria hates you. Why are you allowing it?”
She seemed startled. “You are wrong…I am not responsible… and I don’t care what people say.”
She declared herself in remission from cancer in 2019. She also took over the finances of the regime from Bashar’s cousin Rami Maklhouf, who left the country. And in 2020 the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo singled out Asma, when declaring sanctions: "I will make special note of the designation for the first time of Asma al-Assad, the wife of Bashar al-Assad, who with the support of her husband and members of her Akhras family has become one of Syria's most notorious war profiteers."
It did not help that her emails ordering shoes and candlesticks to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars had been intercepted and published in the media.
Abdu recalls that when he and his wife went to London for their honeymoon, they stayed in Asma’s childhood bedroom and they were stunned when they opened her closet at all the designer shoes and clothes inside.
And after 2020 Syria’s economic problems worsened
To try to stimulate the economy, Abdu says, Bashar put his bother Maher in charge of the drugs business. Manufacturing and supply. The home-made drug was called Ceptagon - nicknamed “Lexus” - because, says Abdu, their biggest customer was Saudi Arabia and, there the saying went: “If it’s not Lexus, don’t buy it.”
Meanwhile, Bashar kept on with his affairs. And Asma had to put up with them.
“She had to see Luna [al Shibl - one of her husband’s girlfriends, known as Syria’s ‘Second Lady’] - four or five times a day,” says Abdu. Luna al Shibl had been put in charge of Assad’s “communication” team.
In 2022, three years after recovering from breast cancer, Asma was diagnosed with leukemia, and she sought treatment in Russia. She received a bone marrow from one her sons in August and she has not been back in Syria since.
Meanwhile, as the world now knows, this year the Syrian government’s opposition gained momentum while Assad’s allies - Russia and Iran - were distracted elsewhere with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. No one was there to help Assad when the rebels were literally at the gates.
And, just like that, on December 8th, with Bashar’s exit to Russia, the brutal reign of the Assads was over.
“What will their days look like in Moscow?” I asked Abdu.
The mornings will comprise of exercise, he says. Bashar will play tennis - he is a fanatic, apparently - go for runs and play table tennis.
And as for Asma?
She needs to complete her recovery. And then ….
There are no designer stores currently in Russia, although that may change if and when the war in Ukraine ends. There is no “Trust” to run. No Vogue magazine covers to pose for.
Of course there are also no more of Bashar’s “women” - for now. On July 5th this year, Luna Al Shibl died in a reported car “accident” - that, just as in the case of Bassel al Assad, was also rumored to be an assassination. There was speculation she had either been leaking information, or she just knew too much.
But Abdu believes that when all is said and done, Asma alone is responsible for the emptiness and isolation of where she is now.
In 2019 he believes he told her she had a window to fix things and try to restore her reputation.
She did not take it.
“And now it is too late.”
Good article, but sad it’s about another story of greed. I’m worried something like that will happen here with a greedy man at the top of the food chain.
If you marry for something other than love, don’t be surprised when there isn’t any?