Who Trolled Amber? - Diana of Damascus | We call her Emma Ep2

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

When Asma arrives in Syria, there’s a palpable sense of hope. People in the country and around the world dare to believe that she is a force for good. Chloe hears from people who worked with her in the early years who - despite everything that’s happened - still believe her intentions were genuine but that she became trapped by the regime.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. Tortus investigates. Just a quick warning before we start that we're going to report on some graphic things in this episode. We're including them because they're an important part of the story, but this episode isn't always an easy listen. Can I ask, on the way over, as you're sort of sitting on this flight,

what did you know of the president and his wife? If I can use this graphic language, I was literally sitting on the plane thinking, what the fuck do I say to a president of a country? In the early 2000s, Brooks Newmark was a conservative politician here in the UK. His main job, to represent the people of a large, mostly rural part of the English countryside. So I can only imagine that if you were to place a bet on the day of his election, he probably wouldn't have been odds-on favourite to be invited to meet a dictator.

So I wrote an article and in it I wrote, diplomacy becomes a little lazy if all you do is talk to your friends. When Brooks wasn't dealing with the needs of his constituents, he'd sometimes turn his hand to writing. And in one particular article, he made the case that countries like the UK need to rethink how they do diplomacy. Sometimes it's best to speak with hostile states, even if that means sitting down with your enemy.

It wasn't a particularly popular. idea at the time. We must confront regimes that continue to harbor terrorists and pursue weapons of mass murder. Syria. In the years after asthma arrived in Damascus, President Bush put Syria on his list of rogue states. But Brooks did find someone who appreciated his article. One day, his phone rings and it's the Syrian ambassador in London. He said, well, I just want you to know, the president read your article.

and was very impressed with your willingness to engage and everything, and he would like to invite you to meet with him. When can you come? Brooks is a bit freaked out, but at the same time, he feels like he has a unique opportunity here. If he gets this right, he can make good on his theory. So he says yes. It sounds like quite a gamble, though.

Brooks didn't have any particular expertise in Syrian politics. I literally, and I promise you, I pulled out a paper napkin, and I drew a picture of the Middle East and trying to remember what country surrounds Syria. All of this is swirling in his mind on his way to meet the president. When he gets to Damascus, he's surprised to find the meeting it isn't at the palace, but it's at Bashar's apartment in town. And he's ushered into a library room.

And Bashar then walks in just by himself, and greets me, shakes my hand, and first thing I notice is he's got quite a sweaty hand. And I'm thinking he's clearly a little bit nervous about meeting me or something. And so I didn't even have to go to my mental map at this stage because we sat down and I immediately get like a 40-minute monologue from Bashar as to why having a relationship with the UK is important, that he spent two years. working in the UK, his wife is British. It turns out all his anxieties were overblown.

The two men, the dictator and the British MP, will they end up talking for over three hours? I felt it was more of a therapy session for him than anything else because it was like he felt he could get all this stuff off his chest that he couldn't really do in a slightly more diplomatic session. And so at the end of it, he says, I really enjoy this with his lisp. You know, when can you come back?

And so begins an unlikely relationship. Brooks ends up going back to Damascus around twice a year for the next few years. And it's on one of those visits that he meets the president's English wife, Asma. And I got invited to her cottage. She had her own little private place, if you will, in which I had a very, very, I thought a very good conversation with her. How did you find it? did you think of her? I've got to say I, on a personal level, I liked her, I thought she was

clever, I thought he was very lucky to have a wife that smart and that savvy, you know, she wasn't a, I would say, the typical Middle East wife, you know, to be kept in the background and everything else. She was, I felt very much an equal. I probably, well, definitely smarter than him, but certainly he is equal. And I think she felt that too. It's during that meeting that she says something to Brooks that he's never known what to make of. So she said, I think she was talking about democracy and openness and stuff like that.

I said, well, you know, if you want democracy, surely you need to create some form of succession. And she says, well, she says something like, I hope that, you know, if my husband does one or two more terms, then that will be it. and he will then be able to pass over to somebody else to take over. I got the sense from her that she didn't want her husband to be president forever. Whatever Bashar claims about reforming the country, he's the head of a dictatorial regime.

And traditionally speaking, those kinds of leaders don't just step down or hand over power without a fight. Brooks must have been thinking the same thing when he was sat in front of asthma but in that moment he felt that she was sincere. Perhaps she really thought she could change things. I guess a lot of people think like that when they first get married. Their partner isn't perfect but they hope that with time they can shape them. And maybe Asma thought she could change Bashar and along with him the well-oiled machine that had kept his family in power for decades.

When you're in the moment and you're with somebody, you think, no, no, he's quite human. Hitler likes dogs. Hitler must be a good guy, you know. I felt I had this superpower when I was able, unlike anybody else in the world, to connect with this person, which of course was completely deluded and mad. And actually, looking back now, I wonder if, in their own ways, both Brooks and asthma were naive. I think there's two sides of Bashar. There's the one side which is the people-pleaser Bashar, which is what he was dealing with with me.

And then there's the family man, has to protect the family, has to ensure that protecting the regime is the most important thing. Did he use that term? Yeah, he used that word. He used that phrase, regime survival. God. The most important thing to me. I hadn't quite really understood when he'd said that to me quite early on in my meetings.

I hadn't really understood what that meant. I was charmed by Bashar into thinking, no, no, this guy definitely wants a good relationship with everybody. Brooks was only half joking when he told me he was daydreaming about a future when he'd be lauded for making huge strides in global relations. This sort of lunatic way I'd persuaded myself, I was getting through to him. In a way nobody else could. I'm going to get a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing peace. Here I come.

And when Asma was preparing to leave London for Syria, it seems likely she was also daydreaming, picturing herself as the queen of a modern nation, one that she would help reform. So did Asma picture herself as a Western saviour? the former banker with her progressive ideas about the economy and female empowerment, did she think she would be the one to persuade Bashar to turn Syria into a new democracy? It took several years for Brooks to realise his mistake. How long would it take for it to dawn on asthma? I think the reality increasingly over time,

even probably before the Civil War, was starting to, kick in. I got the sense that if she tried to leave, she felt she'd be knocked off or something. It's very easy for us in the West to say people like that have a choice, but I don't think she had a choice. I think she was a prisoner of what she bought into, which was the regime. I'm Chloe Hadimuthé and from Tortoise Investigates and the Observer, this is We Call Her Emma. Episode 2, Asma, the Diana of Damascus. Here's what Brooks and Asma were really up against when they set out to make their mark on Syria. Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, died in the summer of 2000.

After almost three decades in power, the brutal paranoid tyrant was dead. This was a man whose reign was defined by, among other things, the Hamer Massacre. In 1982, there was an uprising in a city three hours north of Damascus. The large Sunni challenge scared Hafez al-Assad and his al-Awiate clan, so the president turned the might of the Syrian Air Force against Hammer. Some estimates put the number of dead at 40,000 people. Most of them had nothing to do with the uprising. The massacre was one of the deadliest acts of violence perpetrated by any Arab state on its own

population ever. It's seared into the collective memory in Syria, a crystal clear reminder of what the regime was prepared to do to anyone who dared defy it. Hafez's son, Bashar, oh, he's so much softer, an eye doctor, a man of logic and medicine. This was the beginning of a new leadership under a fresh young president. It was a time when people dead. to feel optimistic, and Bashar said all the right things, that he'd stamp out corruption and move the country towards democracy,

allowing more space for opposition voices. Bashar, who is a qualified doctor, has been working hard since he came to power to modernise and reform the country he inherited. It's not inconceivable that asthma has brought into all the optimism, along with the rest of the world. In the months after Bashar takes office, the couple are engaged, but her name's not yet publicly tied to his. I've been told that Asma spent her first few months in Syria touring the country. At this stage, no one knew what she looked like, a princess in disguise getting to know her subjects.

I wanted to get out. I wanted to talk about the issues, but talk about the issues, as I said, on my own terms. So what did you do? You went out in jeans and mingled with the people? Absolutely, absolutely. And they had no idea who I was. And that's where the frankness came in, and that's where the dialogue came in. And six months after he becomes president, a small article appears in a state-run newspaper announcing Bashar's marriage to a Syrian woman born and raised in England. The wives of leaders aren't big stories in the Middle East back in 2000. Traditionally, they've been kept out the public eye. But that wasn't Asma's style. Okay, so you were a schoolgirl in West London, you were an investment banker, you are now one of the most powerful women in the Middle East, how have you coped with that transition to life in the public eye? Now, of course, excuse me for saying this, but the media thought that this is another woman who's going to be oppressed and is not going to have an active role in the Middle East.

That wasn't the case. I wanted to get out. I wanted to talk about the issues. Asthma would be First Lady for a full decade before the war started, more than enough time for a person to evolve, mature, and for their values to shift. A new asthma would emerge from these her formative years in a new country in a new, powerful role. During that time, she became a mother to a girl and two boys. I've spoken to lots of people who cross paths with her. during this time. All of them have a story to tell. But there are a handful that I think provide

the most useful clues to who she was and how she thought during those years. I've been in a room with Princess Diana watching the effect she has on people and she was just extraordinary. The most critical, hard-hearted people would just go completely soft. And I have to say, Asma had a very similar effect. I've been speaking to someone who moved from Europe to Syria. to work for asthma. They didn't want their real name or voice used here, so I'm calling them Maria, and what you'll hear of them is based on notes I took

during a couple of long conversations we had. Maria was working on a series of organisations set up by asthma. This was the first lady using her soft power to focus on social issues she cared about. Eventually, all her various NGOs would come under the umbrella name of the Syria Trust for Development. The Syria Trust offered schemes for the empowerment of women, loans for new businesses and initiatives for children and young people. She said this is a little revolution, which given what happened later, was perhaps a slightly unfortunate turn of phrase.

But she was feeling very upbeat about the way things were going. Back in those days, the Syria Trust seemed very obviously to be a force for good. Years later, it would be accused of being involved in something very dark, of hurting the most vulnerable in society, the very people it professed to be helping. But all that would come after the war. In those early days of hope, asthma seemed to have a vision for the next generation of Syrians, and Maria was completely convinced by it. 60% of our population is under 25.

And some often say to me, how are you going to deal with this challenge? I don't see it as a challenge. I see it as our biggest opportunity. But that population needs to be empowered. It needs to be involved in the change. She knew she couldn't persuade the adult population of Syria to change their attitudes,

because they were set in their ways. They'd been born, lived and, you know, grown up in a world which worked a particular way. So she was skipping a generation and looking to a younger generation and saying, what can we do to enlighten a life? and empower them.

But the more Maria tells me about this, the more it starts to sound like asthma created a little bubble, sealed off from the reality of living under an oppressive regime. I don't know whether there was a bit of what was going on in Syria that she just didn't want to know anything about. Because for decades, there had been two Syrias, the one on the surface, literally up on street level, a bustling, vibrant society with everyone's.

going about their business. Places like Al-Hat-Tee branch, the headquarters of the General Intelligence Service, they look normal at this level. I've seen the building. It was in the centre of Damascus and it was like any other government office. There was a sportswear shop across the street

and a cafe nearby. But there was another parallel Syria, one that existed often underground. In dungeons where unimaginable torture was routine. Below the clean ordinary offices of Al-Hat-Tee branch deep in the basement was one of the most notorious torture facilities in the country, a nightmarish dungeon where people vanished for years, sometimes forever. Asma must have known about that other Syria, even if she rarely came into contact with it. But every now and then, a crack would appear, and that darker Syria would see

deep into Asma's world. There's this one time Maria remembers when she was in the south of Syria, working for the Syria Trust and speaking with teenage boys. That day, they were talking about violence. And one young lad got up and told us he'd been taken in by the secret police and been made to strip and then sit on a bottle, which, you know, after an hour or so, inevitably starts going up his ass. and then he's made to keep sitting

and the bottle being bottle-shaped gets wider. I have no reason to believe this boy was lying. And now, as far as I'm concerned, this is something that somebody should be looking into. Maria feels close enough to her boss to tell her about it and she assumes asthma will be as horrified as she is. She said, I'll get it looked into. And we taught later and she said,

yeah, well the commanding officer, he's been dismissed. and we've put this to bed. The implication is that it's one bad egg out in the countryside that's now been rooted out, that this isn't part of a bigger issue. One bad egg. Well, that's the way it sounded. To my own shame, I just thought, well, okay, fine, but at least something's been done about it. An example's been made.

Now, the truth is that I don't know whether an example actually was made at all. But, you know, we like to think things are as we want them to be. The reason this memory makes Maria so uncomfortable now is probably because the torture in Syria was well documented by the time Asma and Maria were working there. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two of the world's leading human rights organizations, had documented systemic torture inside Syria's detention facilities for decades.

And they were still documenting it when asthma was there. The accounts of former prisoners that they published included electrocution, being hung by the arms or legs for hours or days, and sexual violence. Of course, all this would get much worse later after the revolution, but it was definitely there before too. And if any journalist in the world was able to look this stuff up online, well then presumably so could asthma. So she must have known that the case Maria brought to her was part of something much more widespread. Perhaps the First Lady felt there wasn't much she could do about it. Either way, she didn't acknowledge any of it to Maria.

And along with Asma, the rest of the world seems comfortable focusing on the positives too, especially when they're being sold to them with grace by a glamorous woman. Her looks, learning and style have made her an icon in Syria. She's been compared to Princess Diana and Jackie Kennedy. Asma Assad is different. the darling of Damascus. But in Damascus in the House of Assad, the palace at the top of the hill,

her in-laws were less impressed. There were lots of rumours flying around that Bashar's sister and mother didn't like asthma. They were doing all that they could to hold her back. Lots of people have told me that Bashar's mother, Anisa, couldn't come to terms with the fact that her son hadn't married into the Alawite clan. And she was old-fashioned.

She believed the president's wife should be behind closed doors securing the airs to the throne, not mucking around with business conferences and NGOs. But in public, asthma never let on about these tensions. Do you have a good relationship with your brother now? She's a very special one of. Meanwhile, Bashar's trying to get to grips with what he's inherited, the controls to a vast security intelligence complex, an intricate machine that his father built. and one that only he really understood.

President Hafez was a paranoid man, determined to hold on to power, so much so that he had multiple intelligence agencies all spying on each other, as well as on ordinary Syrians. This was a country where even people in Hafez's favour feared that the wars had ears. And that doesn't disappear overnight. Syria's elites who for decades had pledged, unwavering allegiance to Bashar's father, those who had benefited from his patronage and who had erected statues and banners of their president, they were all still there. They just shifted their

cult-like devotion from one leader to the next. So even though at first Bashar tells people that he doesn't want his portrait and statues everywhere, as the months pass, he begins to enjoy the adulation. At one point, he even gloats to his biography. my people, they love me. There's an Arabic phrase that goes something like, the son of a duck is going to float. In other words, like father, like son. And Bashar, he takes to this new position like, well, like a duck.

My name is Zaki Mashi. I'm Syrian, actually. Yeah, currently I live in London. Zaki Meshi doesn't mind using his real name. He's been living in exile outside Syria for more than. a decade now. He distanced himself from the regime and from asthma a long time ago. But back when he was an ambitious 26-year-old, he was offered a job working on the First Lady's projects. We thought that she was trying to do something positive. Of course, within an authoritarian

context. I get that Westerners were impressed with asthma. She knew how to charm that audience. She understood the codes, what to say and how to say it. But I wanted to know how to know how that translated for the Syrians who worked for her. Zaki was no fan of the regime, but he also thought there might be a way to change things to liberalise Syria slowly. And he thought that working for asthma might be the best way to do that. But I remember many discussions with colleagues and friends.

We thought why not support her in doing this kind of reform within this authoritarian context? and gradually we can move towards more transparent and inclusive institutions. Jobs at the Syria Trust were sought after. Asma paid well and she'd gathered a large number of smart, capable people. We all noticed that, okay, she cared a lot about her image, particularly in Western media. But at the same time, we believe that she had something genuine.

She wanted to support people. She wanted to do something positive. How did you get the sense that her image was really important to her? What was it that made you think that? So it was too much photos when she did any field visit. Too much photos and media and articles about how modest she was, about how efficient she was. So we thought, okay, I used to tell my friends that

time that she's so much, we felt that she was so much affected by Lady Diana. She wanted to be something like her. This makes sense. Asma would have grown up watching Princess Diana on her screen each night and seeing her on the front cover of every newspaper. Britain had been gripped by its love for the beautiful, wounded Princess of Wales until her untimely death in 1990. Like Asma, Princess Diana had married into a rigid, dynastic institution, the British monarchy. But she'd focused her efforts on comforting the needy and the sick. She wasn't trying to change the country from the ground up, like Asma said she was. But the problem or the issue was in the approach of doing this.

Asma depended a lot on imposing or on adopting Western mechanisms. on the Syrian contact, which was not that effective. The whole system was so corrupt and rotten that offering people new museums or microfinance loans to start small businesses it was like trying to stick a plaster on a critical bleed. At the same time, you have 17 security branches in the country. Syria was very secretive and closed off. No one talked about corrupt.

openly. So it might have taken this potentially naive young British woman, especially one living in a palace. It might have taken her a while to work out how the country really worked. But whether or not her projects were offering any real change in Syria, I think they were useful in another way. It was all part of the effort to cultivate her brand on an international level. The beautiful caring First Lady accompanying her husband around the world, including a return to London to meet the Queen. Good afternoon. How are you? Hello, very nice to meet you.

Hello, actually. It sounds like you've been having very busy times since you've been here. It's been a wonderful thing like that. And you can hear it in the news coverage at the time. The very fact of her being there somehow helps soften Bashar and makes him more palatable. On the right is the president. On the left. A doctor's daughter from Acton in West London.

He's the Paddington Eye Doctor turned president of Syria. She's the suburban girl who's now the toast of the Middle East. She was proving useful to Bashar on the diplomatic level. But back in Damascus, her status as First Lady also meant that, like it or not, there would be pomp and ceremony everywhere she went. Zaki remembers this one time they'd arrived ahead of asthma at a female empowerment event. So when we went there, there was this guy who is a government employee.

He was there with like 50 women ordering them. An important person is coming to visit you. So you don't answer anything. You don't say anything. I'll say everything. So this was the kind of context that Asma used to work with them. Even when she wanted to interact with real people on the ground, she couldn't. It was all like set up.

They prepared the scene for her, not based on her order, but they prepared the scene for her based on their knowledge of how they should act with an authoritarian regime. It wasn't a real experience. It wasn't a real experience. Not only was everything that she was seeing stage managed, but people also saw her as little more than a connection that might help them get ahead. Everyone looked at her as a first lady, not as someone who wanted to be part of a reform. And this was a big issue.

Wasn't she both those things? They saw only the part of the first lady. Went to her office. So it was a bit intimidating, especially when you're, you know, I was 22, I think, or 21. She wasn't much older than we were, so she immediately tried to break the eyes and basically relax the environment

and comfort everyone. When Assad al-Achi met asthma, he was studying a couple of hours away at the American University in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. In case it's confusing, I should say, his name sounds similar to the ruling families, but he's no relation. One day, Assad's phone rings,

and it's someone from Asma's office. And I'm like, okay, and it's like the first lady would like to meet with you tomorrow at the presidential palace. Like, what? So. Asad can't imagine what the president's wife might want with him. I've spoken to other people who had similar calls, being summoned or invited, depending on your interpretation, to meet Asma at her personal office near the presidential palace. She's interested in a Syrian cultural club he's involved in at university

and she wants to talk to a whole group of them, Asad and some of his Syrian classmates. So the students all drive back to Damascus and head to her office. And they spend four hours there, alone with the First Lady. I don't remember very much the content of it except two things that really stayed with me. One was a question she asked out of the blue, completely out of context, when she said, what's your opinion on what happened in Hama in 1982? That's that deadly massacre when Hafez al-Assad's forces killed tens of thousands of civilians in the 1980s. What you need to understand is what happened there.

It's never spoken about in public. History books never mention it. The words, Hammer, 1982. are completely taboo. So when asthma asks this question, it feels like a test. What she's basically saying is, what do you think of the brutality of the regime? And there was a silent, you know,

there was this 30 seconds to one minute of awkward silence because you're doomed whatever you say, right? So there was absolute silence. And we all started looking at each other. And then she eventually changed the subject. So no one answered? No one answered. We just avoided the question. I told a Syrian friend of mine about this, and she said that in that situation,

if the First Lady asks what's your opinion on what happened in Hammer, the only correct answer is what happened in Hammer? Do you think now that that was quite a naive question? Do you think she didn't understand how it would be received? No, no, no, no. She, no, she, it was a message. You know, it was, you know, it was an indirect, an indirect threat, I would say, that, you know, if you cross certain red lines, you will end up in the same fate as those who tried whatever to. That's my thinking now. Back then, I found it the weirdest thing on earth.

It must have felt terrifying to the students sitting in front of her. But that wasn't the only thing that stuck. with Assad from that meeting. And then she asked us, you know, you're graduating soon. Are you planning to come back to Syria or not? This time, he immediately knows the correct patriotic response. And we all emphatically said, of course, we want to come back, we want to contribute to the reform movement that you and the president are leading.

We're very excited. And he's not making it up. He really feels this way. Passion of students who think they're going to change the world around this age. And we have a young presidential couple and life will look rosy. And her reaction was also mesmerizing. She said, I love your energy or I love your enthusiasm. This is really good.

But I don't think Syria is ready for you. Don't come back. go find a job somewhere else. And when Syria's ready for you, we'll call for you to come. And we're like, oh, wow, okay. What did that mean? So. What does that mean?

I was like, is she threatening you? Is she saying don't come back here because we don't want you? No, it wasn't in a threatening tone. It was more in a motherly tone, right? where we don't think me and Bashar, me and the president don't think that Syria's ready for your qualifications, go get a job and experience somewhere else. And when we, as the presidential couple, feel that Syria is ready for you, we will call you to come and contribute. And I'm like, hmm, interesting. So do you think she was saying you're too progressive and educated and intelligent for Syria?

I think, well, I don't know what to think about it now. Now that the war's over, he means. At the time, he felt she was telling the young people sitting in front of her that she recognised that they had creative ideas about how to shape the nation and that she shared those ambitions. That's what she was trying to implement with the Syria Trust, but that she'd realised that that wasn't possible in a dictatorship at that time. In this one exchange, Asma seems to have presented,

presented two sides of herself, the tough First Lady, towing the regime's line on hammer, and then something closer to a soft mother-of-the-nation type, offering advice acknowledging the regime's shortcomings to this young and ambitious group. A couple of years into his presidency, it's already obvious that the promises Bashar made to allow freedom of speech and to move towards democracy, none of that was true. writers, intellectuals and civil society activists who believed him and who, relaxed enough to speak publicly about a new Syria, many of them had been rounded up and put in prison.

Then on February the 14th, 2005, an enormous explosion shakes the capital of Lebanon, Beirut. The former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Raphic Hariri has been assassinated. A massive car bomb, a thousand kilograms of TNT, leaves his vehicle an unrecognisable mangled mess. Lebanon had been under the effective control of Syria for years. Hariri had dared to defy Bashar, and now almost everyone in the international community were sure Bashar had given the orders. At the funeral, his supporters were already accusing Syria's President Assad of ordering the

A few months earlier, Asset had threatened him for questioning Syria's right to dominate Lebanon. Bashar's left tarnished. His regime's beginning to show itself both at home and abroad for what it really is. Asma might have taken solace in the fact that back home, Bashar has come through with a few reforms, liberalising parts of the tightly regulated economy. Now there are private universities and media companies and reforms. to the banking sector. The country is going through remarkable change across all fronts.

Economically, the economy is opening up. We are diversifying just a couple of years ago. Private banks didn't exist. Recently, a stock exchange is opened. We are the only country in the Middle East to have legislation that regulates microfinance and microcredit. So across the economic front, many, many changes are happening. An unusually for a First Lady, Asma's been involved on the margins.

Her background in finance in top international banks is hugely respected in Syria. In 2005, she hosts an international Women in Business Forum in Damascus, attended by First Ladies and impressive high-powered women from around the world. I spoke to someone who told me a couple of stories about asthma from this time that really seemed to provide an insight into her growing influence and authority. They told me this one time, Asma called several ministers to attend a meeting of the Syria Trust. Then she set about telling them what she thought they needed to do. They were furious that the first lady thought she could order them around.

It's not an official government position after all, and some of them walked out. They also told me that Bashar once called up one of his members. ministers and told him that asthma wasn't happy with the interest rates he'd set. The minister was apparently taken aback and he told him that either he was running the economy or she was and that there wasn't room for both of them at the Treasury. Bashar apparently backed down after that. By this point in the mid-2000s, her staff had begun to notice that the First Lady had changed. In the early years, she'd been approachable.

We used to have this margin of discussion. Zaki remembers she used to welcome her staff making honest suggestions about what was and wasn't working at the Syria Trust. Not anymore. Then she adopted this approach of, please let's not focus on what's wrong, let's focus on what we can do. And let's focus more on the positive thing.

So if you want, she started. to become, you know, more and more towards an authoritarian, a real first lady of a dictator. So nobody would ever challenge her or push back on her? Definitely not. It's almost like what happens to famous people after a while when they're in a bubble and they're just are surrounded by yes men. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. when people approach you as a first lady, not as an activist or not as a director of an NGO, you will believe that you can do anything or you can do whatever you want without any accountability.

It's all, it's very complex. It's not the fact that she's bad or she's good. It's the fact that there are different factors that formed her personality to become like that, to become very alienated from the people. So it was not her intention, but she ended up like that. Do you think it would have been possible for her to not end up like that? Is there a person that could have resisted that,

or is that just what happens to anyone, all of us, no matter how moral we are when we start, if we're in that position, we get sort of tainted by it, we get changed by it. I think it's very difficult when you are in her position to confront or to fight against the institutions. So it's a combination of personal interest, power, money, authority, image. At the same time, she did not have a lot of alternatives or safe alternatives, we can say. I know what, in those days at least, what she wanted to do, where she's she.

wanted the country to be and what she saw the future as. Maria had been so sure in the early years that asthma's intentions were honest. But when I spoke to her on the phone, I could hear that she's still wrestling with what to believe about the woman she remembers compared with the asthma that she's read about since the war. It's something that rather haunts me. Unless I've got it completely wrong, she was genuinely trying to put this civic society in place.

and that's what she saw as the future of the country. But maybe I've just been duped or just incredibly naive and this was all just a great big show. When Maria left Syria in 2010 for a new job back in Europe, the war hadn't started yet. Bashar and Asma had kept a relatively low profile and all the accusations that asthma was some kind of monster that she was helping to prop up a barbaric regime

while profiting from its murderous spoils. All that were still to come. I don't buy quite a lot of what is actually being formed as the narrative. It seems to me completely at odds with the person that I dealt with in Syria and what I'm reading now in Wikipedia. She was nothing like that. She absolutely was nothing like that. I can't believe I would have got her so wrong.

And this is why I sort of keep coming back to these possibly slightly naive ideas. But, you know, I'm more minded to believe that she wanted to get out, but actually had a gun put to her head and was told the children would get it if she didn't stay. Because when the war starts, Asma won't be able to sit on the fence anymore

or at least appear to. She'll be forced to make a choice. Which version of Asma al-Assad will she be? The reformer or the conformer. That's next time on We Call Her Emma. You are either with the authoritative, or against the authoritarian regime. Do you know where she was trying to go to?

London, to her home. This series is reported by me, Chloe Hagemotho. It's written by me and the producer Gary Marshall. The field producer was Sarah Dardush. The development producer was Jess Swinburne. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Gunning. Sound design is by Carla Patella. Our theme music is Yamo from the Syrian band Schoon.

podcast artwork is by Lola Williams and Eliza Borner. The executive producers were Jasper Corbett and Bashar Cummings. This podcast was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Centre. Thanks for listening. If you hit subscribe today wherever you're listening, you'll get early access and ad-free listening to the next few episodes right now. And if you'd like to dive deeper into the story, you can do that too.

Just head over to our website, observer.co.uk, where you can get exclusive access to more reporting, including videos and photographs from our investigation. Tortus Investigates.