Front Burner - How Syria's former first lady aided the bloody regime

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

When Bashar al-Assad fled Syria in December 2024, it brought a sudden end to a family dynasty that had ruled the country for more than fifty years. The collapse of his government also prompted a new wave of reporting into the lives of the Assads — and particularly Bashar’s wife, Asma al-Assad.Before she became Syria’s first lady, Asma was Emma Akhras, a British-born investment banker from West London. Once profiled by Vogue as a modernizing force and “a rose in the desert,” she became one of the most controversial figures of Assad's brutal dictatorship.Chloe Hadjimatheou is The Observer's narrative editor and host of the podcast 'We Call Her Emma.' She joins guest host Jason Markusoff to discuss the transformation of Syria's former first lady and her complicity in her husband's regime. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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The Mile Zero Murders, available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hey, I'm Jason Markasoff, in for Jamie. In December 2020, Bashar al-Assadna's family fled Syria. Their escape brought an abrupt end to one of the Middle East's longest-running political dynasties. The Assad family had ruled Syria for more than half a century. And for the previous 13 years,

had waged a devastating civil war against their own citizens, one that killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, displaced millions more, and reduced entire cities to rubble. By the leader's side through it all was his wife, Asma al-Assad, a British banker from West London, who, for a while, was held up as the glamorous face of a modern Syria. Her complicity in her husband's regime is a subject of a new podcast by The Observer, its host, Chloe Haji Mathieu, is my guest today.

Hi, Chloe. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. Let's start before Syria and before Bashar al-Assad. The title of your podcast refers to its main character, not as asthma, but as Emma, this quintessentially British name. So why don't we begin with who Emma Akras was and her childhood in London? What kind of life did it seem she was destined to have before meeting that would be Syrian leader? Yeah, I mean, this is what got me fascinated in her in the first place,

because I felt that she was just one or two degrees of separation from me, really. We're in the same academic year at school. We both grew up in London in immigrant families, aspirational immigrant families who wanted us to have a good education and do well for ourselves. I became a journalist. She married a dictator. It's quite strange. But she called herself Emma in those days.

and she didn't look to anybody on the outside, like a girl that had been raised in the Syrian family. She was very westernised. She's got pale skin and light brown hair and with a name like Emma, which is so quintessentially English, nobody would have guessed her background. She played tennis on weekends. She liked designer clothing. And she went to a good university in London and went on to, to enter the investment banking world, which is quite competitive, I would say. She did extremely well, and very quickly she was one of the front-facing staff quite unusually for her age and her level. But having spoken to several people who worked with her, her managers at the investment bank where she worked in London, they had some interesting stories to tell. One of them described how she turned up at a meeting with some

important clients and claimed that her laptop wasn't working. He believes she was covering up for the fact that she hadn't prepared for the meeting at all. She hadn't done the work she was supposed to do because it seems that Bashar al-Assad had come into town and she had abandoned her work to hang out with him. The couple had first been introduced by Asma's mother when Asma was a teenager. Her mother worked at the Syrian embassy in London and it seems that when She realized that the president's son, who was not in line for the presidency at that point, he had an older brother who was going to be president of Syria when their father died, not Bashar. Bashar had studied medicine and decided to go into ophthalmology,

and he'd come to London to further his studies, and Asma's mother orchestrated a meeting. But then the older brother, Basil, died in a car accident. I felt like I'd been struck by life, he said one, Syrian after receiving the news that Bacel Assad had been killed. Marcel was an army major and head of the presidential security body in Syria. And Bashar al-Assad, who was a very unlikely character for president, suddenly got called back to Syria to prepare for the presidency. His older brother was this tough macho-Syrian guy. Bashar is, I mean, he's such an unlikely president. He really just didn't seem to

fit the billet thaw. He doesn't look the part. He's tall and weedy and chinless and has this kind of very soft voice, not at all the macho image of his elder brother and his father, but he ended up becoming the president of Syria in 2000 when his father died and within months suddenly, asthma was by his side as his wife as the new First Lady of Syria. Is your sense that her attraction to him was, because you don't portray him as a, you know, a very attractive figure, was, was the lure for her power? I mean, she was already working on her own career trajectory as a, as this banker you talk about. Yeah, I don't know. So her school friend says that she feels that there was some attraction. It must have definitely been exciting. I think right from the get-go when they began courting, which, which was much later when Bashar realized he would need a wife if he was going to be president. In the year or so before his father died, I think some kind of courtship began. And someone at J.P. Morgan at the bank where she worked, told me that she vanished without having taken any leave or without calling in sick.

And when they investigated and tracked her down, she said, oh, I'm in Libya as a guest of Gaddafi with my boyfriend Bashar. For Asma, this seems to have been exciting. I mean, her family would certainly have known that Syria had a very bad human rights record that Hafez al-Assad, the president before Bashar, had been known for some terrible massacres, including one in a town called Hammer, where about 40,000 people were killed following an uprising in the town. The people were rounded up in neighborhoods and executed. Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, which had a stronghold in Hamar, had always been opposed to the Ba'ath party's rule over Syria, and it led a violent campaign against regime officials and institutions. On the morning of February 3rd, 1982, Syrian military units surrounded the city.

And for the next 27 days, Hamar was bombed from the air and ground. Much of the city was destroyed. It has gone down in Syrian memory as one of the biggest atrocities in the countries. history. So Asma must have known the family she was marrying into, but I suspect, like most young people starting a marriage, she may have thought, you know, my husband's not perfect, but, you know, I can change him. And maybe I can change Syria, too. So Syrians also seems like they thought he could bring change, be this reformer, not the sort of brutal dictator his father was, who created this giant police statement, as you said,

perpetrated the major massacre. But then Bashar also becomes this violent leader who would go on to be accused of using chemical weapons against his own people. Before we delve a bit more into Asma, how do you make sense of her husband's transformation into this authoritarian leader? Yeah, it's very interesting. So I wonder whether he believed his own rhetoric in the beginning. He gave a speech in Parliament when he first became president. And I remember this. I was sitting in London and I had visited Syria previously. I had really fallen in love with the country. And Bashar al-Assad took the reins and gave this incredible speech

where he sort of said all the right things that he wanted to move the country towards democracy. And he was this young, sort of unwitting, I should say, president. Somebody who hadn't set out for the presidential role, He'd sort of been forced into it by his older brother's death. And he'd studied to be a doctor. He seemed like this soft, gentle man who might really offer Syria something different. And asthma being by his side really played into this.

She was a beautiful woman who was very fashionable, elegant, erudite. She had ideas also about starting NGOs and helping. helping people in Syria with things like microfinance and business and empowerment of women. And so it really felt in the first few years that Syria might be offered something new, something much more Western facing, I guess. But those aspirations died really quite quickly. within the first two years, intellectuals who'd sort of bought into Bashar al-Assad's talk of reform had opened up political salons and were pushing for more freedom and more democracy.

And very quickly, they were being rounded up and imprisoned. And it became clear that if democracy was going to happen, it was going to happen a lot more slowly. and Syria fell back on its old, tried and tested means of control of the population through fear. There were about 17 different intelligence services all spying on each other, each having recruited huge numbers of the population who were also spying on each other. And this may have eased slightly under Bashar al-Assad, but certainly he wasn't closing down these intelligence services. Even as it became clear quickly, as you say, that Bashar wasn't the reformer that he initially appeared to be.

Osma, if I'm not mistaken, was more portrayed for longer as his breath of fresh air. And it seems like a lot of that was cultivated, right? There was these image consultants, people were kind of cultivating this Princess Diana presence. She's photographed consoling the families of deceased soldiers. The pictures posted on the president's Facebook page. She visits victims of the war her husband fighting. so ruthlessly. In a glowing profile, Vogue magazine called her a rose in the desert, then abruptly pulled the piece off the web. Why do you think that there were so many people eager to believe that

she represented this different future for Syria? It's interesting, isn't it? And I think that it's not a small thing that she was a beautiful, elegant, well-spoken woman. I think it's easier to believe that a beautiful woman with young children or orphans sitting on her lap in photo shoots must be a decent sort of maternal character. And Asma really cultivated this image. She really steered clear of politics, which I think also helped. She really focused on culture, music, the arts, these kind of NGOs that she was creating in Syria.

And I think people saw this beautiful woman, and they, who was Western educated and who spoke English, you know, without an accent. and I think they brought into this idea of Princess Diana of Syria. Becoming First Lady was never a part of my career plan. This position doesn't come with a job description or a manual. And so I decided to approach it from a citizen's perspective. What could I do to make my country stronger and fairer? And from the very beginning, I was drawn to helping empower people that work very,

And of course, Princess Diana was on the screen when me and Asma were young girls growing up in England, you know, Britain and the rest of the world were obsessed with this kind of really sad, mournful British princess. And I think Asma is no coincidence, really, that she cultivated this image. She did hire PR consultants, very expensive firms, top of the range. I spoke to somebody who, you. who was dealing with her particular file at one of these PR agencies. And they managed this amazing coup, as it was for them, to get a big feature in Vogue magazine.

Asma had this double-page spread with a photograph of her standing at the top of a mountain overlooking Damascus, the capital, with her wind-swept hair looking absolutely beautiful. and the Vogue reporter had gone in, I have to say, without having done much preparation and not having put much thought into the human rights record in Syria, and painted this portrait of a very young, modern couple who ran their family on, and I quote, wildly democratic principles, as they sort of sat around the dinner table eating fondue and talked about sending their children. to Montessori schools and, you know, it ticked all the right boxes. And asthma must have been absolutely delighted by this. But unfortunately, for Vogue, just days after this was published,

the Arab Spring hit Syria and protesters were out on the streets calling for democracy and asking for more rights. The Syrian government declared today, the situation is completely calm in all parts of the country. But amateur video posted on YouTube and elsewhere, They're told a very different story. They are calling it the Aleppo volcano. In Syria's second largest city, protesters are determined to bring down the regime.

So-called Day of Dignacy demonstrations were held across the country on Friday. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out on both sides, including in the capital, Damascus, where pro and anti-government supporters clashed in the old town. They promised Friday was going to be big. It turned out to be huge. This is Banyas on the northeastern coast. all calling for the regime to fall. And their protests were met with unbelievable brutality.

People were being rounded up and imprisoned in their thousands. Hundreds were being shot in the streets. For the past week, Dara has been burying their dead. Demonstrators killed while clashing with security forces. Dozens are believed to have died. People here say at least 150, far higher than the figure of 37 provided by the state. The UN says at least 5,000 lives have been lost in Syria since the protest movement began.

Look at the sniper on the roof, says the man filming this footage. He's shooting. The day began with Syrian forces opening fire. The protesters have no choice. They still have been scatter. And suddenly this Vogue article looked really tasteless. And Anna went to the editor of Vogue, spent an enormous amount of money

getting every single copy she could off the streets. And it was not available online for a very long time. A few people had photographed it and were uploading it. But it's still quite hard to read if you want to get hold of it. Between tariffs, trade battles and an ongoing war in the Middle East, the lazy days of summer seem to have skipped Washington this year. So our podcast, two blocks from the White House, is here to keep you caught up even if you're in vacation mode.

Join me, Katie Simpson with correspondence Paul Hunter and Willie Lowry and other journalists from our DC Bureau for a front row seat and what this all means for Canadians. Find and follow two blocks from the White House with new episodes every Wednesday in your favorite podcast app, including YouTube. So the war hits in 2011. She's been in power for a decade. Do you think that she changed once the war took hold?

I think she probably began changing before then. There are several moments in the podcast where I spoke to people who worked in her office at her NGOs. And I described these two series, which I saw for myself. You know, I went out there in 2006 and I remember walking around Damascus. And it was just this wonderful, vibrant city with cafes and restaurants. I remember walking past one of these. intelligence agencies. And you would, it just looked like an ordinary government office.

But underground, we now know we've seen the images as well, was a dungeon where people were held disappeared into, really, and have talked about horrendous torture going on there. And it was very easy if you were a tourist to walk around and pretend this wasn't going on. And I think if you were Asma Lassad, you could also pretend it wasn't going on. But there were moments for asthma when this darker Syria intruded on her world. People came forward and talked about people being tortured. And this kind of thing would encroach on her world. And so I think at some point, she had to make a decision when these things were coming to her attention, what she would do. And she chose to believe that these were individual cases, bad eggs in the system, and not a systemic problem.

And I spoke to one of her colleagues who also said that at some point, if your first lady in Syria, you can't any longer see the truth of what's going on in the street. You can't see how people are living. You can't see the corruption and the fear and the paranoia. because wherever you arrive, things are pre-prepared for you, whether or not you want it, it's not something within your power. In a system like Syria, people behave as they believe they're supposed to behave because there is so much fear. And so everything was sanitised for her constantly. I have several instances in the podcast where I've spoken to people who approached her in the early months of the Arab Spring in Syria where people were being.

shot in the street. These were peaceful protesters. This was way before this descended into a civil war before these protesters had any weapons. And some of them were actually people who had worked for her in the past. I tell the story of one woman, Rima Dali, who just stood in the street in absolute frustration holding a sign, calling for peace. And she was arrested and disappeared into one of Syria's dungeons and her colleagues were terrified for her. And this was a moment where Asma could have potentially intervened, but she made it very, very clear to her employees really early on. You can have your opinion. I don't want it brought in the office and I am not going to intervene on your behalf. There was a moment where she seems to have been offered safe passage out of Syria.

in 2012, this is by this point, the civil war has really started taking hold. Tens of thousands of people have been arrested. The prisons are overflowing with people. People are being executed in huge numbers. These are protesters. They've begun taking up arms against the state. And in the midst of all of this horror, which the West is starting to see on their TV screens and pay attention to. Suddenly, we get an insight into what Asma Al-Assad has been up to behind

closed doors. There are these unguarded moments that we get a glimpse of through her emails. The London-based Guardian newspaper says it has obtained more than 3,000 documents believed to be emails sent and received by Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma. It seems that someone in Bashar al-Assad's office had managed to hack the email. emails of Bashar and Asma and published their emails. And we see that Asma was shopping. She was buying chandeliers, designer shoes, designer furniture, a Ming vase. Between June and September of 2011, Asad's wife bought thousands of dollars worth of luxury goods, including a $4,000 vase from Harrods in London and a $9,800 handmade table.

On February 5th, Asad emailed his wife a love song the same day he launched a brutal assault on Humph. So there's this kind of real Marie Antoinette moment where the country is up in flames and Asma is sort of sending messages to her friends in the West, describing what color gems she wants in handmade French jewellery. In the end, one of the central questions of your series seems to be whether she was this woman trapped in this authoritarian system, like a complicated victim, or somebody who was complicit in what the Assad government was doing. Where do you come down in that? So I think there is a possibility that she wavered at certain points. I know that at one point

I was told by a journalist who was very close to the regime. In fact, he was at school or at university, I should say, with Bashar al-Assad and was for a short time his advisor before he fell out of favor with the regime. And he is still very well connected. And he said that in 2012, soon after those emails were leaked, asthma did try and leave the country. And when I heard this, I had this moment of thinking, oh my God, maybe, maybe things got so bad that she just thought, I can't stand this anymore.

This is too much. But then I was told that the reason that she wanted to leave was because it became clear to her that her husband was having extramarital affairs and she was furious about this. He had been sleeping with the wives of other top officials within the regime and she felt humiliated and she tried to leave but she was not allowed to go. I think he said she got as far as the wrong way, and the pilot said he didn't have the authority to take off. And so if asthma did try and leave because she was so angry about the affairs, what I heard was that the deal that was then struck was that Bashar would do what he was going to do,

have the affairs he was going to have. But in return for Asma's humiliation, he would agree that she could have more freedom within the economy and within the business world in Syria to do as she liked. It's important to sort of look at this through the context of Middle Eastern dictators' wives. We don't know any other Middle Eastern dictators' wives. At least I don't. I don't remember who Gaddafi's wife was or Saddam Hussein's wife or any of these top dictators. You don't know their wives because these were women who essentially stayed within the home.

they were not public figures. And asthma was very, very different right from the outset. So if she had wanted to leave at some point and if she had had twinges to her moral compass as the war got worse and worse, it seems that at some point her attention was drawn elsewhere and she had, let's say, she was compensated in other ways. And it seems that by 2020, she was certain certainly considered to be one of the top people in the regime controlling Syria, largely in control of the economy in Syria, but also bankrolling, the war, bankrolling the regime, and bankrolling her family. You're reporting, you know, beyond her financial control, looks into some of the accusations

and allegations about her in another realm. That's Assad government's treatment of children. You were reporting on claims that the children were separated from their parents who were detained or disappeared, sometimes placed in orphanages. And these children were alleged to have been used as leverage against uncooperative families or dissidents. And you traveled to Syria to investigate these allegations. Tell me what you found and how asthma herself figures into that story. Yeah, so I have to say, you know, it's reporting this particular story has been one of the hardest things I've ever done in my career, because there is so much rumor.

And particularly since the regime fell, everybody has a story to peddle. And this idea that asthma was involved in the kidnapping and holding of these children, it seemed really quite far-fetched. And also, it seemed like something that people might make up because asthma was constantly photographed

with children on her lap. This was part of her image. and the organisations that she ran, the NGOs that she ran, also had a hand in running the country's orphanages, which is why she was often photographed there. There were these PR opportunities whenever she would visit the orphanages. And when I got there, I was really surprised. All the employees that I spoke to in the one particular orphanage

where we got sort of open access, all of them were telling me she knew what was going on here. She hired the top staff. She was incredibly involved. She received monthly reports of what was going on inside these orphanages. And she was told about these detainee children who were brought to the orphanages by the intelligence services. That's not how orphans would normally be presented at an orphanage. It may be the police.

It may be the Ministry of Social Affairs, social workers who would bring children who had been abandoned or whose parents had died. But these were being brought by the intelligence. services. And there were very clear directives which were written, and I saw these documents, instructing the orphanage not to hand these children over to any family member who came and asked for them without explicit approval of the intelligence services. So the documents are there that show that these children were being held, essentially kidnapped from their families, detained as tools of war. I spoke to women who worked in these institutions who had direct contact with asthma, particularly in two orphanages. Both of them said to me that they had informed asthma.

One of them had written about it in a report that asthma had received. The other one spoke to asthma directly and said to her, what's going on with these kids of detainees? You know, they were called crisis children. That was the euphemism used inside the orphanages. And Asma said to this woman who raised it with her, these are none of your business. These are the children of terrorists and you should not become involved in things that are none of your business.

One of the most shocking speeches I heard of her was later in the war after 2020. I think it was about 2022. So quite soon before the regime, fell. And she talks about the history is written in the blood of truth and in the future of our children. And it was, I can't remember the exact wording, but it was shocking to me because it was quite aggressive for a woman who had started out modeling herself on Princess Diana using soft words and sort of sticking to talking about culture and the needy in the country.

Suddenly she was being photographed with the families of soldiers and she was talking about blood and the price that Syrian soldiers were paying for truth and the future of Syria. But of course, my priorities today are helping martyrs families, helping injured soldiers, and people that have been displaced or affected by this war. It's because of these people that Syria is standing today and we owe it to them to honour their sacrifice. If I'm helping Syrians, then ultimately I'm helping the president as well. So it seems to me that by the time that the Assad regime was starting to crumble,

you know, maybe we shouldn't say starting to crumble because not many people saw it, coming when the regime did eventually fall. But by 2020, when the world had essentially decided that Bashar al-Assad had won the war for all intents and purposes, he still only controlled about 65% of the country, but the front lines were frozen. And it didn't seem that the rebels were going to gain any more territory. The world began to open up again. The UN was photographed in Syria having tea, UN officials having tea with Asma al-Assad. Bashar was readmitted into the Arab League and was able to visit countries like Saudi Arabia and have the red carpet rolled out for him.

There he is, labelled by so many a monster in a brutal civil war that's left nearly half a million dead, many millions displaced Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Now, welcomed back to the Arab League with open arms and two kisses. from Saudi crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. The Arab world can now reposition itself, he said, in a world of Western dominance that lacks principles, manners, friends, and partners. It seemed like the Assad's were going nowhere. So other countries during the Arab Spring fell quickly.

Assad didn't. They survived this bloody conflict until the end, when the rebels entered Damascus in 2024. And you tell the story about how he and Asma quietly fled the country under Russian protection, after reportedly assuring many around them that help was still on the way. How should we understand this final act of Bashar and Asma is leading Syria? I think, you know, an important thing to say is that the reason that Bashar al-Assad survived the war was largely because the Russians came to its rescue.

Both the Russians and the Iranians and the Iranian various Iranian militias like Hezbollah. Without their help, Bashar al-Assad would never have survived the war. But, you know, Iran had been depleted by its own war with Israel and Russia had been depleted by its war with Ukraine. And so when the final act came and when the rebels began pushing down in this surprise attack from the north, you know, Assad's troops and the Syrian military have been weakened for from years of terrible salaries and hunger. You know, the Syrian economy had been shot. It was all over the place.

There hadn't been any proper business coming into Syria or money coming into Syria for years and years, and the war had cost them greatly. And so the Syrian military put down their weapons and abandoned their posts, and Bashar was still hopeful that the Russians would come to his rescue. But it seems Russia had really time, tired of Bashar al-Assad because they had won the war for him, but he wasn't prepared to sort of

win the peace. He had bankrolled a lot of his final years through a drugs trade, an amphetamins trade and business that he had built in Syria that was affecting neighbouring countries. And they were really, it seems the Russians were really sick of him. And one of the most interesting things I learnt was that there was a list that was drawn up by the Russians in which they were thinking of alternatives for Assad as a new leader for Syria, a new president. And on that list was Asma al-Assad. And so I wonder whether when they offered safe passage for Bashar and Asma in Moscow, when they did eventually escape, whether Asma had a hand in that, whether it was the fact that they liked asthma much more than Bashar, That meant that they opened their door for the Assad's ads.

So a year and a half later, can you update us on what the Assad family is up to today? They're so mostly in quiet exile in Russia? They are in exile in Russia where they have a lot of property. Their children speak fluent Russian and at least two of their three children attended university there. They apparently have a nice country villa and also a high-rise penthouse in a sort of, I guess you could call it the Beverly Hills of Moscow, where lots of other. rich and famous people have their residences. And also lots of other dissidents who've been often safe passage like Edward Snowden apparently lives there. And the former president of Ukraine,

Viktor Yanukovych, you sort of wonder what kinds of dinner parties they might have there. They also often travelled to Dubai. So I learned that the Assad's have a golden visa for the UAE. they have residency, but they have been told by the government in the UAE that they should not move permanently to Dubai. One major reason given I learned was because of security issues. As you can imagine, there are a lot of people who have a lot of hatred towards Bashar al-Assad and towards asthma. And so one of their major concerns must be that they do not. fall to an assassination plot. But they have a lot of money. I've learned that they still have a lot of companies that are being run for them all around the world through shell companies and through

different very loyal parties that are still by their sides. They have millions. Their younger son has business interest in China. He speaks fluent Mandarin and apparently his mom has taken an interest in helping him with that. So they travel to Dubai. Basha has been there at least twice. Asma goes there regularly, her brother, her mother, her three children all live over there. I think they're okay. I think they have a pretty decent life. Chloe, thank you so much for taking that time to talk to us. You are very welcome. There continue to be attempts to prosecute Bashar al-Assad for war crimes.

Asma al-Assad was investigated by the UK metropolitan police for allegations that she had aided and encouraged war crimes by Syrian government. forces. Those allegations were never pursued. Chloe's podcast series on Osmal Assad and the Assad family is called We Call Her Emma. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for today. I'm Jason Markosoff. Thanks for listening to Frontburner. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.