Assad’s British wife – and the £1m home on ordinary London street family own

Once the “freshest and most magnetic of First Ladies”, Asma Assad is now the wife of a war criminal seeking refuge from similarly despotic regimes. 

Mrs Assad, the wife of ousted Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad was once described as “a rose in the desert” by Vogue in 2010, just months before the Arab Spring ignited a civil war which would see hundreds of her compatriots murdered at the hands of her husband.

Born in London in 1975, Mrs Assad lived a relatively normal upbringing as the daughter of a successful cardiologist and senior Syrian diplomat.

Educated at the £9,000-a-term Queen’s College, she graduated from King’s College in 1996 and embarked on a banking career with companies such as Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan.

Four years later, she married the son of dictator Hafez Al-Assad and soon after became First Lady as her father-in-law’s death at 69 saw her husband rise to power. Many across the West saw the couple as a vehicle for driving change in a region that they had little influence over.

The first decade of the new century saw her as one of the most recognisable female faces in the Middle East, her photogenic looks uncovered by a face veil a sign of the country’s relative freedom for women in the region.

Just months after her Vogue interview which described her as “the most magnetic of First Ladies”, peaceful protests took hold of the country following the brutal reaction to anti-government graffiti sprayed on a wall by 14 year old Mouawiya Syasneh in Daraa, southern Syria.

In the coming years, as other Middle Eastern leaders fell either willingly or otherwise, Basher Al-Assad brutally cracked down on the Syrian people with the help of Russian bombs and Iranian backed troops.

Debate rages as to Mrs Assad’s role, some seeking to pay down her involvement or influence and others describing her control of a secretive labyrinth of committees and policies, run by her henchman, which controlled everything from access to the internet to subsided food rations.

Having grown up in London, Mrs Assad’s family remain, with her father, Fawaz Akhras still working as a consultant at a private Cromwell Hospital in South Kensington and as a medical director of Cardiac Healthcare Services in Harley Street.

The family still own an ordinary £1 million house in the west London suburb of Acton, a million miles away, figuratively, from their daughter’s luxurious presidential palace that was looted by jubilant crowds on Sunday.

Mr Akhras is one of several directors of the British Syrian society, a membership-based not-for-profit organisation that believes in strengthening relations at all levels between Britain and Syria.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing or involvement on the part of family members who have refused to comment on the current situation in Syria.