Jew World Order

Most parents would want to safeguard a young family – and many other Syrians,
of all political hues, have already done exactly that by fleeing the
country, or making plans to leave.

It is one of the more contradictory facts about the couple who have presided
over 18 months of bloody repression of their people – with Mr Assad ordering
the arrest, detention and torture of thousands of his own compatriots, or
sending tanks to shell rebel villages indiscriminately – that they have
tried to preserve the nearest thing possible to a normal family life.

They were never an ordinary family, with their palaces, private jets and
billion dollar fortune. But now photographs have
emerged – apparently taken for propaganda reasons – showing in intimate
detail how they led an apparently warm family life, one to
which it may never now be possible to return.

Mr Assad is seen doting on his young children, exchanging a joke with his
British-born wife, and blowing out the candles at his daughter’s second
birthday party. One picture shows the family in holiday mood during a flight
– perhaps on the family’s Falcon 900, used to fly to their favourite palace
near Latakia on the Mediterranean. The president is even glimpsed
contentedly taking pictures himself, enjoying his favourite hobby.

The photographs, from Mrs Assad’s private collection, were handed to a foreign
friend in Damascus before the uprising started in the spring of last year.
They are believed to have been taken between five and seven years ago in
Syria, probably by a professional photographer, and appear intended to
portray the family as happy, normal and modern. Their cosy intimacy looks
too natural to be have been staged.

Unseen by the photographer, and by most visitors to Syria, were the torture
chambers, tanks and chemical weapons that the family relied on to maintain
their brutal rule.

Also unseen among the photographs of Hafez, now aged 10, with his sister,
eight-year-old Zein, and their brother Karim, now seven, are images of those
less fortunate Syrian children who have died in the course of the uprising:
some blown apart in artillery barrages against rebellious suburbs, others
slaughtered in their villages by loyalist Shabiha militia who cut their
throats in vengeful rampages.

When the photographs were taken, Mr Assad was still a relatively new
president, offering a new kind of rule to Syria: he was modern, open, and
had promised reform and apparently a change of direction.

He married Asma at a private ceremony in 2000 in Damascus when his promise was
at its height.

Beautiful, intelligent and stylish, she threw herself into charity work and
won over the hearts of many Syrians who were desperate for a breath of fresh
air after years of dictatorship – an asset, it appeared, to her husband’s
rule.

By her own gushing account – given in an unfortunately timed interview to
Vogue magazine under the headline Rose of the Desert, just before the
uprising broke out last year – she started “dating” Bashar
in 2000, just months before his father died and he inherited the presidency.

She was born to Syrian parents in 1975 in London, grew up in Ealing and
attended London schools. She and Bashar had known each other when she was a
child – he also lived in London for a while, training and working as an
ophthalmologist. At the time of her courtship he was back in Syria and she
had her own career as an investment banker, which she gave up for him.

“I quit in October because by then we knew that we were going to get
married at some stage,” she told Vogue. “I couldn’t say why
I was leaving. My boss thought I was having a nervous breakdown because
nobody quits two months before bonus after closing a big deal.”

The year 2000 was extraordinary for her husband, now 46. His father, Hafez
Assad, Syria’s president and one of the strongmen of the Middle East, was
variously feared, respected and hated by his people. During three decades of
his iron rule he supported foreign terrorist groups and carried out brutal
massacres of opponents when challenged, notoriously at Hama in 1982 when as
many as 20,000 people may have been killed.

Assad senior had originally prepared his ambitious oldest son, Basil, to
succeed him, but he was killed in a car crash. So he transferred his
attentions to Bashar, who had been assiduously groomed for the presidency
for six years when his father died.

The coming to power of his son filled Syrians with hope, even though it was a
dynastic transition. Hafez had been a stiff and distant father – a tyrant in
both public and private life, and perhaps one reason why the youthful Bashar
was shy and lacked confidence. Bashar’s warm, modern family was a crucial
and very successful part of the image he portrayed to the world.

In a region full of religious extremists, he was particularly keen to show the
family as modern and secular.

According to those few outsiders who saw into the privacy of the family at
home, the public image was completely genuine. David Lesch, an American
author who met the Assads privately many times, told The Sunday Telegraph:
“Both wanted to maintain as normal a life as possible for their
children, even though the parents are the first couple of Syria.

“They spent most of their time living in a fairly modest three-storey
Damascene home that has neighbours right next door on either side of the
house. They made sure that each of them, if at all possible, spent quality
time with the children every day. And they had a hidden office retreat in
Damascus, where I have met both Asma and Bashar separately, where they often
bring the children while they are working so they can spend time with them.”

The Assads would drive around Damascus, with Asma at the wheel of an SUV –
Vogue describes how she drove Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt around the city.
Sometimes they would be seen walking around, even startling audiences at
theatres by sitting among them. It was exciting for Syrians who had been
used to the president’s father.

“It was how they tried to live and maintain a fairly normal family life.
This image was embellished in Syria, and it endeared them to many Syrians
for years, but it was based on truth. Of course, now the normal life they
had been seeking is gone for ever.”

The style was modern, but the hoped-for reform never happened, and protests
which followed the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Yemen were met with
violence and counter-violence that has now spiralled out of control.

Those happy days of normal family life must now seem a long time ago to Mrs
Assad. Wherever she is, perhaps she sometimes flicks through the family
photo album – a pleasant escape as she remembers how it was when they were
still Syria’s golden family.