Who Trolled Amber? - Asma’s choice | We call her Emma Ep3

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

In 2011, the Arab Spring hits Syria and Asma has a decision to make: speak out in favour of the popular revolution or stay loyal to the regime. But what choice did she really have? We call her Emma is a 6 part original series from Tortoise Investigates and The Observer.To binge listen to all episodes today, ad-free, subscribe to The Observer and use the code AUDIO50 to get 50% off your annual subscription.You'll get access to:This series and all our podcasts before anyone elseAd-free listeningPremium newslettersPuzzles from the inventors of the cryptic crosswordExclusive offers from our partners including Mubi and iescapeTickets to join Observer events in our newsroom or onlineOr subscribe to Observer+ on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to listen to all our podcasts, including this one, without any ads.Reporter - Chloe HadjimatheouProducer - Gary MarshallSound design - Karla PatellaPodcast artwork - Lola Williams & Eliza BournerExecutive producers - Jasper Corbett and Basia Cummings Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tortus Investigates. Just a quick warning before we start that we're going to report on some very graphic things in this episode. We're including them because they're important to the story, but this episode isn't always an easy listen. I don't know if I told you this story. I went with Asma as an expert. Saki Meshi spent quite a lot of time with asthma

when he worked with her at the Syria Trust, including this one time in 2008 when he travels abroad with her. During a break in their busy schedule, they retreat to the hotel. And Asma invited me and a colleague to her suite. The three of them are sat round a table together and Asma's phone starts to ring. It's her husband Bashar, the president of Syria. She looked at the mobile, Bashar. She answered, yes, no, wait for me.

And she closed. Zaki's laughing here because what she'd done, it felt so insane to him. Syrians spent their whole lives pledging allegiance to their country's leader. His portrait hung in every classroom, in every government office, in shops, in homes and on huge billboards on the streets. People were so fearful of the regime and Bashar that someone once told me she was too afraid to curse the president even in the safety of her own head. And although Asma isn't just any ordinary citizen, Bashar is still His Excellency, the Supreme Leader. Obviously, she was in control. Definitely she was in control. It was the president and she ordered him to wait and without any, I mean, in front of her employees.

And this was like, we were like very shocked. So when Zaki first told me this story, I wondered whether this could have just been an unguarded moment. A wife feeling mildly irritated with her husband for calling about something unimportant. when she's busy. But Zaki says he remembers everything about this incident exactly because of what it showed him about asthma. The asthma he knew was so controlled, so aware of the fact that she was always on show, that she could never have slipped up. Okay, you trusted us that much or you wanted to send us this message or to give us this message that you are in control? It seemed to Zaki a clear signal at the time about the dynamics of her relationship with her husband and who had the higher status.

So this small stories, you can say, you can build on them and understand that she was not that weak person within the palace. That's what Zaki took from it back when it happened. She had influence over her husband, which, in just a few years' time, when the war starts will matter more than ever. Then she'll be forced to decide how to use that power, whether to use it to protect the Syrian people or herself. You are either with the authoritarian regime or against the authoritarian regime. And I think she would have taken a huge risk if she was against Bashar Lassah.

They could have killed her very easily. I'm Chloe Hajima Thay, and from Tortoise Investigates and The Observer, this is We Call Her Emma. Episode 3, Asma's Choice First of all, this wasn't a war. It was a revolution. This is Osama Othman, and the story that will eventually connect him to asthma starts back when he's in his mid-40s, living in a town, a short drive from Damascus. He has all the ingredients for a happy life, a night. home, a wife he loves, children, and a great job as an engineer, but he can never be truly

content, because there's always something hanging over him. Every day there was this knowing dread and paralyzing fear of the regime's security apparatus that never left us. It was always there meddling in every detail of our daily lives. He told me a story in Arabic, so we asked a Syrian actor called Majd to interpret for us. I was never, not even for a moment, optimistic that Bashar al-Assad's coming to power would actually result in any meaningful improvement in the daily lives of the Syrian people, not in the slightest. Osama is right, of course.

Not only has Bashar failed to be the reformer he promised to be, but this soft-spoken man who says he can't stand the sight of blood will end up being far more brutal and murderous than his father. But when the Arab Spring spreads across the Middle East in 2011, it feels like an unstoppable force. Every day we were following around the clock the events that were rapidly unfolding in the neighbouring countries under the banner of the Arab Spring. I remember watching this all play out from afar, from a new posting in Washington, D.C. I was working for the BBC at the time and I just finished a stint in the Middle East. Unrest is spreading across the Arab world.

Protesters in the Persian Gulf Nation of Bahrain held their ground for a third day. They're calling for sweeping political changes. I'd been in Damascus just months before, working with the local BBC reporter, trying to document some of the small reforms the government had achieved. And lots of people felt sure that the Arab Spring would bypass Syria. The regime just felt too powerful and the opposition too weak. But then, I'd also be able to be. been in Egypt the previous year and seen protests with just 12 people. Revolution seemed impossible

there too, and yet these countries' dictators were falling one by one. The protest movement that toppled President Mubarak here in Egypt is now spreading all across the region, particularly to Libya. But then in a town in the southwest of Syria, a group of kids, excited by all the protests in neighboring countries, spray-painted a wall with anti-regime graffiti which said, it's your turn doctor. It was a reference to Bashar who'd trained as an eye doctor when he lived in London. These boys were arrested and then they were tortured. When they were eventually returned to their families, it was clear that these 13, 14 and 15 year olds had been badly beaten and their fingernails had been pulled out. When their parents took to the streets to

protest, they were shot at. There was widespread outrage about this, and demonstrations broke out across Syria. And they're usually pessimistic Osama. Well, he can't help being infected by the energy. To be honest, I went out to the first protests a bit timidly, because the intelligence officers in my neighborhood knew my face and my name. So I just hovered around the edges of the demonstrations. I took some photos doing what I could in that fleeting moment.

It was a surreal historic time when we couldn't believe we were finally in the streets, chanting for the freedom. At this point, early on in the protests, most people weren't calling for Bashar to step down. They thought he could be the one to overthrow his father's old system and lead them to a new, more just future. This was even after all the signs that Bashar wasn't really implementing any reforms, people still had hope. I was busy handing out flyers along the sidewalks and I would wait all week for Friday to arrive just to make sure that the flame of our revolution was still burning bright. Friday afternoons are important in the rhythm of the Syrian week.

They mark the beginning of the weekend and they start with prayers at the local mosque. Unauthorised gatherings are illegal, so these weekly prayers, when the community are all in one place, they become the focal point for organising demonstrations. At first, the regime's forces arrest a few people. Then they begin using snipers to shoot one or two protesters. Look at this amateur video,

thought to be shot on Friday that was posted on YouTube over the weekend. That suddenly, protesters panic, and start to flee as gunned. Then they wait for the international response. When all the authorities get are a few muted reprimands from world leaders, they go further and further. Before long, the revolution is all-consuming. And where you stand on it defines who you are.

And it exposes fault lines within communities, just like it did on Alan Way, Asthma's Childhood Street back in London. Neighbours living side by side have different allegiances, those who are for the regime and those against it, those who are on the streets protesting and those who are working for the state, even within the same families. And Asama's family is no exception. I didn't have any specific details about his work because I didn't. I didn't get involved in that side of things. He didn't talk much about the subject.

Osama knew his brother-in-law Farid worked for the government, but not much more. And Farid knew that Osama was anti-regime and that he was going to protests. Their family ties kept them bonded together, but they kept a safe distance from each other. Sometimes it's easier not to know too much. It wasn't exactly what you'd call a full friendship. It was more of a profound sense of kinship and comfort whenever I was around the family. People in Syria were constantly having to make choices about who to trust and who to share intimate details of their lives with. An American guy once told me that soon after he moved to Syria, he found out that lots of the new friends he'd made were spying on him and reporting back to the secret police.

Seriously unsettling. But he never held it against them because he understood that it was what they had to do to survive. This was the Syria they lived in. One evening I got a call from Farid. He said he really wanted to see me. He actually said, I need to see you right now. But he didn't give any details over the phone. And it was late at night.

Nothing about this call is normal. The time of day, the urgency in his voice. So Osama drops what he's doing and he goes straight upstairs to his brother-in-law's flat. At his apartment door, without me even stepping inside, he told me. Farad starts talking, words tumbling out over each other. He's in a terrible situation and he needs Osama's advice. What should he do?

Osama spends a long time thinking about it and his response will change the course of these two men's lives forever. And asthma's. In the first six months of the revolution, around 3,000 protesters are shot and another 20,000 people are arrested. The world's starting to see videos coming out of Syria, of unarmed protesters being shot in the streets

and of bodies lying in pools of blood. Looking back, there was this one incident that sticks with me from those early days, but I now realise hinted at what was to come. It was in May 2011 when a kid followed his brothers to a protest. Hamza al-Hatib, a 13-year-old boy's body, was returned to his family last Wednesday after he was arrested by security officials a month ago in Derr's region of Syria. Hamza's corpse is a bruised, swollen mess, and most shocking of all,

the child's penis had been cut off. The shockwaves from this incident ricocheted all the way up to the White House and then to the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Hamza Ali al-Qatib, and I can only hope that, you know, this child did not die in vain, but that the Syrian government will end the brutality and begin a transition to real democracy. That had been the hope that Bashar would accept the demands of the people. But a month after Hamza's bodies returned to his family, the president gives a speech at Damascus University.

Today we meet an important juncture in the history of our nation. Instead of using the language of reform and concessions, he's blaming the protests on a conspiracy. The insinuation being that these aren't real people asking for change, but troublemakers drummed up by the West in an attempt to orchestrate regime change. And then Bashar compares the uprising to germs. The treatment will be difficult, he tells his people, but it's necessary in order to strengthen the country's immunity. Former Conservative MP Brooks Newmark told me that when he met asthma,

she told him she only wanted her husband to be president for a couple more terms before handing over power. If she's serious about that, surely this is the moment she can help Bashar make that move. Nobody is immune from what's happening. We've heard of women, children being killed, medics, journalists. It seems like this, it affects everyone. This is what you might imagine, Asma would have said, about the torture of children in Dharah and the torture and mutilation of Hamza al-Hatib,

as the First Lady of Syria, as the mother of the nation. Now, as a mother and as a human being, as I said, we need to make sure that these are children. But actually, this was an interview she gave to CNN in 2009, two years before the revolution in Syria. She was talking about a massive Israeli offensive in Gaza. And in this case, she seemed outraged that the world was watching Palestinian civilians being killed. We have a choice. We can either sit by and we can sit and watch our TV screens and watch atrocities and see some really horrific images. Or we can get up and do something about it.

She's acknowledging that in these moments when you can see history happening before your eyes, you have choices to make, even when the consequences could put you in danger. But just a couple of years later, on the atrocities in her own country, asthma was silent. In the months after the protest began, she stayed well clear of any public appearances. But she was still turning up to the office every day, and at the Syria Trust for development, her employees were watching her, wondering if she would give anything away about how she really felt. In the years before the revolution, Zaki had noticed a change in his boss. Asma used to sit at the same table as her employees and listen to them, giving weight to their

opinions. That didn't happen anymore. And as time went on, she became colder and more distant. she started to become very alienated from the people. She started to be very arrogant in the way she discussed matter with us. But now that the protests were getting bigger and bigger, there'd been another noticeable shift, a return to how she was in the early days. She went back to her first personality. She became friendly, she became more approachable,

And she wanted to listen to many of us. Looking back now, Zaki wonders if she was hedging, making sure her employees wouldn't turn against her. I think she wanted to tell people again that she's one of them. And if anything happened to the regime, so she had this kind of protection from people. I'm a part of the regime, but I'm not like them. But then one day she gathers everyone together at the Syria Trust.

To convince everyone in the room, in working in Syria Trust, that Syria Trust should not be involved in any political discussion. However, at the individual level, you are free to do whatever you want. So keep it outside the office? Keep it outside the office. She's acknowledging that something significance going on. It might not sound like much, but in a dictatorship, it's a pretty big deal. So Zaki and the others in the office take her up on her offer.

They're careful not to criticise the regime directly, but they also speak out against the bloodshed. Me and my colleagues were telling her that the regime is using brutal brutality against demonstration. You felt like you could say that to her without any repercussions? Yes, yes. She listens, but she doesn't offer solutions. Meanwhile, things are getting worse and worse out on the streets, and before long, like it or not, politics is coming into the office.

Many of our colleagues were detained. For what? What were they detained for? Because they participated in the demonstration. One of them is, I mean, I don't know if you know, Rima Dali. between the opposition and present Asak's forces pushed Rima Dali to the streets of Damascus on Sunday. I do remember Rima Dali. One afternoon in 2012, this 33-year-old woman put on a paint-splattered red dress and went to a crossroads near the Syrian Parliament building.

She walked out into the middle of the road and stood there as cars honked and swerved past her. A crowd of people nearby clapped and whistled as she held up a scarf with words, painted across it. She volunteered, stop the killing. We want to build a Syria for all people. She volunteered for the Syrian Red Crescent and had worked for the Syria Trust. The First Lady knew her well. Dolly's friends confirmed she was arrested, but no video has been released in the moments

after her one woman stand. When Zaki hears about Rima's arrest, he knows what that might mean for her. And he hopes that Asma might intervene before Rima's lost in the labyrinth of the prison system. end, it's an international campaign by her friends that helps Rima get out relatively quickly. Not any intervention from asthma, as far as we know. So at that time, we believe that she would have supported us. I mean, these are her employees at the end of the day. And she was very clear at that time, but I cannot do anything.

So what was she saying? My hands are tied. I can't do anything. I can't speak to security services. She doesn't talk like that. She will never ever say something like my hands at times. No, she believed that she has the power, but she wanted to be very clear that I will not intervene in the work of my husband. Not I cannot intervene, but I will not intervene. I think she was trying to convince herself that those people are bad. and they should be detained. I'm not sure if she was trying to convince herself or if she was really convinced that, okay,

they're fighting against terrorist groups, not against their population. Even though she knew some of these people, these people were working for her and she knew them well. Yeah. Asma had a decision to make, whether to buy into the government's propaganda about the war or believe all the videos that activists were posting

and what the world's media was reporting, that this was a real revolution of the Syrian people. Osama and his brother-in-law Farid also have a decision to make. He was clearly in a state of agitation. Remember, Farid's called Osama to come around to his flat because he needs his advice about something work-related. Farid's job isn't exactly for the faint of heart. So he worked in the field of photography for the forensic evidence department for the military police.

He manages the collection of evidence, including photos of the bodies of people who've died in incidents involving military activity. They're typically people who've died in car accidents or drowned or sometimes suicides. When his office gets a call, Farid dispatches one of his junior colleagues to the scene. Their job is to photograph the deceased. But since the revolution, the bodies that Farid's dealing with have changed. For a start, there are more of them. A lot more. And the bodies look terrible. It's hard to explain how bad.

So Farid opens up his computer and he shows the summer some of the photos. There were signs that they had been beaten. Some of the bodies had burn marks. Several looked like the person had been violently ripped. from his hospital bed, with various pieces of medical equipment still attached to his arms. It became painfully obvious that some of them had been executed right there in the hospital. Most of them had been tortured to death and their bodies transferred to the hospital, but others had been executed at the hospital itself.

These were people the security services had arrested, sometimes at protests or because they were suspected of being anti-regime, or else they were just unlucky, or maybe they'd just annoyed a neighbour or a colleague who'd given their name to the authorities. Some of the bodies had their eyes removed. The hollowed-out sockets had been left entirely empty and void, and there were signs visible signs of extreme starvation.

You could see how the victim's skin was hanging from their body, bones. The overwhelming majority bore signs of intense suffering. I never, never imagined that I would ever have to see something like this. And the craziest thing of all, the cause of death for these people was often listed as the same thing. They said that they had died of sudden cardiac and respiratory rest. In other words, their heart stopped beating, which I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure is the end result of almost any death. It doesn't really tell you very much about the why. Farid was inadvertently witnessing the scale of the repression and the lengths the regime was willing to go to to torture and kill its opponents. He'd been seeing more and more of these

photographs, sometimes dozens a day, but until now he'd kept this all to himself and a sense of panic was paralysing him. Farid knew he was being drawn into the regime's systemic cover-up. Like it or not, he felt complicit in what they were doing. He'd forged his career working for the regime, but this felt different. This was mass killing on a huge scale. Osama's mind was racing, trying to take in everything Farid had just shown him. I couldn't stop thinking about the perpetrators.

What could have been going through the mind of these individuals? who subjugated these poor people to months of torture, right up until the moment they died, starving, bruised, wounded and burned all over their frail bodies. I couldn't stop thinking about these twisted people. The torturers, they were walking among them. Ordinary people, fathers and brothers and sons, going to work every day and then coming home to wash the blood off their hands

before tucking their children into bed. It was a chilling thought. The regime's crimes had been framed as careers. And the fact that thousands of people were employed in these kinds of jobs normalised it. Those people needed to be held to account. It occurred to a summer that these photos were an incredibly valuable record. They could help families find out what had happened to their loved ones, many of whom had simply been lifted off the streets and disappeared.

And so a plan started to form in a summer's mind. And so I told Farid, I need you to continue working in your position, and you need to give me a copy of all the photographs you collected. The idea was to ensure that the people responsible for these people's deaths would eventually face justice, that they'd be trialed in a fair impartial court once the Assad regime falls. And we expected that to happen within months. just as it had in other countries.

Basama was sure that it wouldn't take long for Bashar's regime to collapse. After all, it had only taken months in Egypt and Libya. In the meantime, Farid agreed to start saving all the day's photos on a memory card and bring them back home and then hand them over to a summer who would then download them and keep them safe. It was crazy dangerous. If the regime got wind of what they were up to, they'd likely end up like those they were documenting, not just dead, but tortured horribly to death.

I can't imagine how scary it must have been taking this kind of risk. It was at that moment that Varid's job in the military police, his job for the Syrian regime, it changed. Now it was something that was morally justified, and suddenly we had a very noble goal that we were working towards together. There's something I haven't told you about those photos. Most of them were taken in the courtyard of Mezaer Military Hospital in central Damascus. The building sits right at the foot of Mount Meza, a hill which overlooks the city, and right at the top of Mount Meza is the palace, the traditional residence of the Assad family. More than a decade later, when the regime fell and the palace was being ransacked,

people stood at the large ornate windows looking down on the city and several people have told me that you could see directly into the courtyard of that hospital. And in some of the photos of Samoa were seeing, behind the bodies in the distance, the palace windows are clearly visible. This extremely close proximity to the palace was very symbolically significant. But Bashar al-Assad didn't need to see. these images with his own eyes. He didn't need to examine them with a magnifying glass. The various networks responsible for all these heinous crimes, they were also directly connected

to a private network, overseen personally by Bashar al-Assad. And Asma al-Assad was definitely aware of the whole situation. There is simply no way that this could have remained unknown to her. Did Asma look down from the palace windows and see those emaciated bodies covered in burn marks? Even if she couldn't make out the details, the sheer number of corpses lying in that courtyard would have been something new in the early years of the war. The unavoidable truth was that her husband had made up his mind about the approach he was going to take to the protesters. By July 2012, Syrian government forces had begun carrying out air strikes against city.

and towns under the control of opposition forces. A barrel bombing in the southwest of Damascus, barrel bombs are cheap, crude devices, essentially barrels filled with high explosives and other materials such as scrap metal. Thousands of civilians were being killed. Bashar was also dropping chemical weapons like sarin and chlorine on populated areas and gassing his own people. More than a thousand died in one single, attack in 2013. Around this time, Bashar and Asma's children, two sons and a daughter, were between 11 and 9 years old. And I struggle to imagine what the conversations must have been like in the

evenings in the Assad household. What did they talk about around the dinner table? When we come together at dinner time or in the weekends, we talk about our day and our time and what's happened. So they are very much aware of what's happening in Syria. This is from a country. This is from a few years before the war, Asma was speaking to a documentary crew. And so she asked him, she said to him, Baba, what do you do? And he said to her, I try and help people. I'm not sure how much she understood of it. But now, if you are to ask her, what does your father do?

She says to everybody, my father helps people in Syria. I wonder what she told people after the war started. There is no such thing called barrel bombs. You have bombs. And any bombs is about killing. It's not about tingling people. This term was used only to demonize the Syrian army. That's it.

It's part of the propaganda. Yes, he was polite and softly spoken. But by the time the war was underway, it was clear to Syrians and to the world who Bashar really was. But some people inside and out of Syria still held out hope that Asma was different. We went to his wife, to Asma, and we scheduled a meeting. This is Hind Kawabat. These days she's a minister in the new Syrian government.

She decided not to speak to us, but this is a story she told on a podcast a few years ago. Back in 2011, she was teaching conflict resolution. And she'd been at school with Bashar. So when the revolution started, she felt like she was in a strong position to make an appeal directly to asthma. And the first lady granted her and her friends an audience. We were four women, went there from 8.30 a.m. until 12, 15. And all what we ask her that, let's talk with this, with these people, listen to them.

Let's fix it. It's going to be lots of victims and lots of people who's going to die. She received us in the palace in the mountain. The official palace, the big one up on the hill. Yeah, yeah, a big one, yeah. This is Huda Majaki. She was there with Hind meeting asthma that day. She was very humble and very nice to us. Asma was so friendly that Hooda felt comfortable to ask her about the children

who'd sprayed graffiti and had then had their fingernails pulled out. Couldn't she talk to her husband and prevent this kind of brutality from happening to any more children? She tried appealing to her as a mother. And I told her you are a mom. And how do you feel when somebody punish you? daughter or anything. So in the end, this kid, he wrote on the wall and you cut his finger. So this is not acceptable at all.

At this point in the meeting, Asma seems to be listening to these women. And then all of a sudden, the phone rings and she excuses herself and goes off to speak to the person on the other end. She got a phone call and when she answered, came back, everything was changed. She was very much like saying, no, there is a conspiracy. This is not something organic. The international community are doing it to get rid of them. Suddenly, she wasn't listening. Now she was parroting the regime's lines about the protest.

And she came back with different face, different masks. She started talking like her husband. She gave us like a slogan, We are taking care of the country. We are doing the best for you. did you think was on the phone? There is something inside the couch, hearing what we are talking. Because we...

In the room there was a listening device. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So somebody maybe called her, she said, you have to be tough. And change the way you talk. Wow. And she started talking like that our Syrian people, they don't listen to the government. and they throw things from the car. They make their country dirty.

They're creating stories, not read. So she was saying that Syrian people don't behave properly. They're like spoiled children. Yeah, yeah. Hooder believes the Syrian intelligence services were listening in and that they called Asma to give her directions, telling her not to be so soft and not to give in to these women's demands

to speak to her husband about all the children. the violence. Do you think she had freedom in that time to speak to him and say, we need to try and negotiate, we have to stop the torture, the reaction is too much? Me and my friend raised your husband, and she replied, Cea Reis. His Excellency. Wow. Wow. So she elevates him so that he's almost like a god, not a human being. I think she believed in him, not in us. One thing that seems to me like a clash in my brain is that she sold her image as a kind of Princess Diana figure,

a mother of the nation, a soft, kind woman who has NGOs to help children and orphans. And then when the war began, it was the children in Darrah. who painted the graffiti and they were beaten and tortured, how can she make an excuse for this in her head, do you think? I think she thought this is mostly lies. And because of the bubble she lived in, they are totally separated from the people. She and her husband, that's the problem.

This is Ayman Abdul-Nor, a lifetime of, ago, he and Bashar were friends when they were university students, and later, Eamon became one of the new president's advisors. But he learnt the hard way that his old friend's reforms didn't amount to much, and after criticising the regime, Eamon was forced to leave Syria. As a journalist in exile, he remained very well connected, and he understood how people inside the palace, including asthma, were thinking when the civil war started. and the bubble that she lived in with her husband, she couldn't understand why.

We are feed you, we are giving you electricity, we are giving you everything. So you are demonstrating for what? What are the demands? She couldn't understand that the people, they are citizen in a country, not slaves in a farm she owns. So it's not about food.

It's about freedom and dignity. So she couldn't understand this. A farm she owns. This analogy about Syria being Asma and Bashar's farm, it's something that Syrians I talk to keep coming back to. Yeah, the farm is when you own a farm, you own the livestock on it, you can slaughter them, you can decide the day which you slaughter them.

You own it. And they think that family, they own Syria. So it's like a farm. They can do whatever, whatever. And the cattle is the population? The population, yes, for sure. For sure. Around a year into the revolution,

Eamond says asthma did something drastic. Yes, it was very big rumors, and I think it's a fact. The details are sketchy, but he has it on good authority that she tried to leave. the country. Do you know where she was trying to go to? London, to her home. How did you hear that? A lot. I reported at that time. Were you hearing that from inside sources? Many, many, many, yeah. When he first told me this, I thought that maybe, finally, the scales had fallen from Asma's eyes. But as the number of dead and imprisoned was rising,

She'd finally realised that her husband truly was an Assad, brutal and incapable of reform. Perhaps she really had looked down from that window and seen the reality of what was happening in her husband Syria. But as I kept investigating asthma, I learnt the truth. And the truth of why she tried to leave? Well, that's a very different story. Coming up on We Call her Emma. Welcome to Syria. we're finally passing in across the border.

Yes, I was offered the opportunity to leave Syria, or rather to run from Syria. Even in terms of Bashar's relation with ladies, I think he was sick. What do you mean sick? Like he was sick, I think he was sex obsessed. He had this sex obsession. This series is reported by me, Chloe Hadimuthé.

It's written by me and the producer Gary Marshall. The field producer was Sarah. Dardoche. Our interpreter was Aisha Aldris. The episode was fact-checked by Amalia Sautland. The development producer was Jess Swinburne. Sound design is by Carla Patella. Our theme music is Yammo from the Syrian band Schoon. Podcast artwork is by Lola Williams and Eliza Borna. The executive producers were Jasper Corbett and Bashar Cummings. This podcast was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. Thanks for listening to We Call Her Emma and for supporting our journalism. If you'd like to listen to the rest of the series today without any adverts,

just subscribe wherever you're listening. You can also access exclusive reporting, including videos and photos from our investigation, over on our website, observer.co.com.uk. Tortus Investigates.