Asma Al-Assad Sues for Divorce

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The Syrian rats left the sinking ship of their state just in time, whisked away from the tens of millions of Syrians whose lives they have ruined and who would gladly tear them limb from limb. They were saved by the Russians, who flew them out and brought them to Moscow, where they have been given asylum. Bashar Assad brought with him 278 kilograms of gold worth nearly $300 million, $2 billion in cash, and the ownership deeds to dozens of properties in Russia.

His fetching wife Asma — fetching enough to make the cover of Vogue — grew up in London, the daughter of Syrian parents. She met her lanky paramour Bashar Assad, who was studying to be an ophthalmologist, in that city. Even though no one could call Bashar Assad a lady-killer in the figurative sense, literally he was not only a killer of many ladies, but also of men and children. Asma didn’t mind. She found his billions of dollars in net worth among his most attractive features. And so they married — the gold-digger to the holder of the gold.

Asma was by her husband’s side all through the Syrian civil war, a loyal helpmeet and boon companion, in those difficult years when he held onto power only through mass killings. A Middle Eastern Lady Macbeth, Asma did not blanch when her husband and his associates, including his uncle Maher, ordered long prison sentences, tortures, and mass executions in the forty secret prisons Assad and his father before him had built all over Syria. His regime was responsible for killing a half-million civilians. Asma knew everything for which her husband was responsible — the tortures, the prison sentences for people who had done nothing at all, the executions of an estimated 150,000 Syrians in those prisons, and the fantastic sums he kept amassing — billions of dollars piling up that he had stolen from the Syrian treasury, or made by being a narco-trafficker, producing and selling fentanyl in the Sunni Arab states of the Gulf.

But after two weeks in their Moscow exile, Asma now sees Bashar as a loser. The billions he brought with him in gold and cash have been seized by the Russian state. So have the many properties he owned in Moscow. Suddenly his most attractive feature has disappeared. Still worse, Moscow is such a dreary place. Even the shops at GUM are nothing compared to what Asma could find during her shopping trips to Europe, in places such as Jermyn Street and the Burlington Arcade in London, or on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. Asma loved to shop, loved to spend her husband’s money at Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Prada, Sonya Rykiel, La Perla, and other stores to that fashionable effect. And whose company can she now keep in cold and off-putting Moscow? Her old friends from Damascus are not going to visit her; they are now on the lam themselves. No one will have anything to do with her because she is now, like Lord Byron, too “dangerous to know.” Of the tens of millions of Syrians who want both her and her husband dead, surely a few of them will find a way to attempt their murders. No one wants to take the risk of visiting her, even if she now has a Russian security detail, for she will always be a target for assassins.

She thought they could hold onto Bashar’s billions. Vladimir Putin had other ideas — he’s seized those assets. Will he keep them for the Russian state, as a payment for all the military help that Russia provided to keep Assad in office during the Syrian civil war? Those planes at the Hmeimim airbase near Latakia, and the ships at Tartusm have been expensive to maintain since 2011. Or might Putin return the money and other assets taken from Assad and deliver it to the caretaker government in Damascus, as a goodwill gesture, in order that the Russians might be allowed to retain the use of the port at Tartus, where part of Russia’s Black Sea fleet had been stationed, and the airbase near Latakia?

If Asma has sued for divorce (which the Kremlin denies) and is granted support, will Bashar be allowed to pay his ex-wife alimony out of the money he stole from the people of Syria? Won’t such an arrangement make her even more of a target for Syrians seeking to punish the odd couple? Asma says she wants to move to London. How likely is it that the U.K. government would grant her asylum? She’s the wife of a war criminal and a war criminal herself. And even if the British government were to grant asylum, she can’t possibly appear in public. No shopping trips to the swankiest of stores, no visits to museums, concerts, plays. No, she will forever be a target, and thus a danger to all those in her vicinity. She’s not going to be allowed back into Great Britain.

Asma is now stuck in Mother Russia, where she’ll be assigned to a flat not necessarily in Moscow. She may end up in Omsk or Tomsk, or somewhere else in the far east of Siberia where she will be condemned to live, stripped of her husband’s billions, forever looking over her shoulder for the knife or gun of a would-be assassin about to strike.