Assads to the people of Syria: Fuck You I've got my Fondue Set

Dead Man Walking?

The Guardian has a series of reports today on emails hacked from the private inbox of the Assads. While Assad has ordered the murder of thousands of his own people, he and his British wife Asma live a gilded life.

On 5 February 2012, the day after Assad's artillery had pounded Homs, killing several hundred civilians and blowing up a makeshift hospital,Assad, using the pseudonym Sam,  sent his wife the lyrics of a country and western song by the US singer Blake Shelton, and the audio file downloaded from iTunes.
: "I've been a walking heartache / I've made a mess of me / The person that I've been lately / Ain't who I wanna be."

The emails appear to show how tens of thousands of dollars were spent in internet shopping sprees on handmade furniture from Chelsea boutiques. Tens of thousands more were lavished on gold and gem-encrusted jewellery, chandeliers, expensive curtains and paintings to be shipped to the Middle East. While the country was rocked by Assad's crackdown on dissent, his inner circle was concerned about the possibility of getting hold of a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, or a new chocolate fondue set.

On 19 July 2011, Asma al-Assad could be found placing orders with her cousin Amal for jewellery made by a small Paris workshop. She requested four necklaces: "1 turquoise with yellow gold diamonds and a small pave on side" as well as a cornaline, "full black onyx" and "amethyst with white gold diamonds" of similar design. Amal replied that she would "launch" the order in mid-August with a view to getting it done "by mid-September". On 23 July 2011 Asma said she didn't mind the delay and added self-deprecatingly: "I am absolutely clueless when it comes to fine jewellery!" She signed off as "aaa" with: "Kisses to you both, and don't worry, we are well!"

  Dead Woman Walking?

Others items that caught the fancy of Syria's first lady included a vase priced £2,650. On 17 June 2011 she sent details to the family's London-based fixer Soulieman Marouf, and added: "Pls can abdulla see if this available at Harrods to order – they have a sale at the moment." Marouf replied with good news: "He bought it. Got 15% discount. Delivery 10 weeks." He added: "Today you should be receiving an Armani light … If you need anything else please let me know."

The emails suggest a woman preoccupied with shopping – but also with an eye for a bargain. She was eager to claw back VAT on luxury items shipped to Damascus, it emerges, and complained when a consignment of table lamps went missing in China. Emails sent from her personal account also concern the fate of a bespoke table, after it arrived with two "right" panels instead of a right and a left one. More than 50 emails to and from the UK deal with shopping.

Some of Asma al-Assad's prospective purchases arouse polite comment from her friends. On 3 February 2012, she was browsing the internet for luxury shoes, according to an email titled "Christian Louboutin shoes coming shortly".

She wrote to friends sharing details of new shoes on offer, including a pair of crystal-encrusted 16cm high heels costing £3,795. She asked: "Does anything catch your eye – these pieces are not made for general public." One friend replied dryly: "I don't think they're going 2 b useful any time soon unfortunately."

Most jarring were the occasions when the world was hearing news of the worst incidents of violence and bloodshed and the Assad family could be found shopping or joking online, often using pseudonyms. An adviser to the Assad inner circle, Lamis Omar, appeared to acknowledge that the first couple risked seeming too detached and sent Assad a link to an article in the US magazine Businessweek that described the president's "life in a cocoon".
Emails from the Syrian first lady's account are typically signed off with "AAA" – corresponding to Asma al-Assad – or "Alia Kayali", which is the name of the company secretary whose identity activists believe Asma hid behind. In email correspondence with shops in Paris and London, the signoff "Alia" predominates.

In July, "Alia" is found placing an order for about £10,000 worth of candlesticks, tables and chandeliers to be shipped from a Paris designer through a state company in Dubai. In early November, as protests continued, a London art dealer received a message asking about the availability and price of works costing between £5,000 and £35,000 each. In late January "Alia" unpacked a pair of bedside tables shipped from a Chelsea cabinet maker, only to discover a mistake. She complained they had "different finishes and they have different colour draws!?".

In Britain, suppliers said they were unaware that the woman behind the email account was in fact Syria's first lady. Tony Carpenter, who runs a bespoke furniture firm in Billingshurst, West Sussex, sold "Alia" a designer Baxter Gilbert table in November. The table cost £6,257. "I had no idea," Carpenter said. "She gave me a London address. The furniture went to Dubai. I assumed the job was in Dubai."

Carpenter added: "She was a very charming lady to deal with. I spoke to her once or twice, though it was mostly by email. She paid the bill very promptly." The table was oval-shaped and marble-topped, he added.

Sometimes he searched the internet for video clips that impressed him, on one occasion sending her a clip from America's Got Talent of "the best illusion of all time" – a man appearing to saw another man in half and then putting him back together again, to the delight of the judges David Hasselhoff, Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan. Link to this video
Assad's emails reveal his inner fears and suspicions. On 16 October, as the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, called for international action to avoid "full-blown civil war" in Syria, Assad circulated from his iPad an article to a list of undisclosed recipients an article alleging that the US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, was responsible for "recruiting Arab 'death squads' from al-Qaida-affiliated units in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Chechnya to fight against Syrian military and police".
He sent another rabid article to his wife on 23 July that described Rupert Murdoch as a Jew and an Israeli citizen and "pretty much" Satan.

Ans so on and so forth.... Clearly they are either in denial about the situation in their nation or they simply don't give a shit, If they have put their heads into a noose then I will shed few tears even if I oppose the death penalty, THe only shame is that, as a British citizen, Asma has the absolute right of return to the UK.

Sickening, cannot understand how the world can stand by and I should be hardened by now

This is the final report by Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin who was killed in Homs today. The title of the post is apparently the last message she sent to a friend.

She died alongside French photographer Remi Ochlik when the house they were staying in was struck by Syrian artillery. American journalist Paul Conroy was injured.


The international press is currently posting tributes to a woman who was by all accounts one of the modern greats of her profession.

Remi Ochlik

Two years ago when speaking at a memorial dinner for journalists killed in the line of duty she said:

Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers, children. Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice.

We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado? Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices.

Sometimes they pay the ultimate price

 Sadly she and Remi paid that price. According to the Journalists Memorial website, They were the fourth and fifth journalists to die  the course of duty this year. They join Mukarram Khan Atif (Pakistan), Hassan Osman Abdi (Somalia) and Enenche Godwin Akogwu (Nigeria) in death. In time all of them will be added to the reporter's memorial in Bayeux

Asma Assad breaks silence

She may be glamorous but she is married to a piece of shit

Britain may not export as much as it once did but we have provided the butcher in charge in Syria with a rather attractive wife. More or less ever since the  protests started in Syria last year (and of course the brutal repression) Asma Assad has hardly ben seen or heard. However that seems to have changed.

However, according to the Telegraph in an email sent to The Times recently (I won't pay money to read the Times online). Mrs Assad, 36, wrote that her husband "is the President of Syria, not a faction of Syrians, and the First Lady supports him in that role".

The email is said to have continued: "The First Lady's very busy agenda is still focused on supporting the various charities she has long been involved in, including the National Comittee to Exterminate Dissenters, The Bashir Al-Assad Nobel Peace Prize Nomination Committee and the National Vogue Readers Circle,  as well as supporting the President as needed (it is believed that she does so by taking pot shots at potential dissenters she encounters in the Damascus branch of Louis Vuitton).

"These days she is equally involved in bridging gaps and encouraging dialogue (She has  apparently recorded a message protestors in which she demands that they surrender and face torture or be shot and then tortured). She listens to and comforts the families of the victims of the violence (mainly by shooting them as collaborators in the protest) ."

Raised in Acton in London she is the daughter of a Harley Street cardiologist.She is Sunni whose family originally comes from Homs, the epicentre of the revolt against her husband, and the city bearing the brunt of the violence by his forces.

Personally I could not give a shit how charistmatic or stylish she is, she has nailed her colours to the mast of a disgusting tyrant. It is only a pity that she has the right of return to the UK once her husband is deposed.

Vogue to Syrians: Eat Shit continued

Joan Juliet Buck goes on to demonstrate absolutely that she has the political nous of a maggot. There is no way she was being ironic here:

The presidential family lives in a modern apartment in Malki. On Friday, the Muslim day of rest, Asma al-Assad opens the door herself in jeans and old suede stiletto boots, hair in a ponytail, the word happiness spelled out across the back of her T-shirt. At the bottom of the stairs stands the off-duty president in jeans—tall, long-necked, blue-eyed. A precise man who takes photographs and talks lovingly about his first computer, he says he was attracted to studying eye surgery “because it’s very precise… and there is very little blood.”

The old al-Assad family apartment was remade into a child-friendly triple-decker playroom loft surrounded by immense windows on three sides. Asma al-Assad likes to say, “You’re safe because you are surrounded by people who will keep you safe.” Neighbors peer in, drop by, visit, comment on the furniture. The president doesn’t mind: “This curiosity is good: They come to see you, they learn more about you. You don’t isolate yourself.”

There’s a decorated Christmas tree. Seven-year-old Zein watches Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland on the president’s iMac; her brother Karim, six, builds a shark out of Legos; and nine-year-old Hafez tries out his new electric violin. All three go to a Montessori school.

Asma al-Assad empties a box of fondue mix into a saucepan for lunch. The household is run on wildly democratic principles. “We all vote on what we want, and where,” she says. The chandelier over the dining table is made of cut-up comic books. “They outvoted us three to two on that.”

I don’t think there is any need to go on

Anna Wintour - ugliness goes deep

As for the American Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, the not-wife has a few choice words to describe her (primarily due to Wintour’s pro-fur stance)… Most of them rhyme with bunt, shunt and stunt. In relation to his article, she her words for Wintour and Buck were “A pair of callous bitches”.

On the evidence of this piece of fawning drivel I can only agree.

Vogue to Syrians: Eat Shit

This is old news but still worth a rant:

Okay so you don’t buy Vogue for its insightful political analysis but there must surely be times when even the producers of such a piece of glossy fluff like Vogue must wonder if they are utterly out of tune with reality.

I wonder what Anna Wintour and the Vogue editorial board were thinking when they put the March edition together.I doubt they gave a single jot of care for the situation in the Middle East in general or the people of Syria in particular.

Joan Juliet Buck

The issue in question  included the following Asma Al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert , written by socialiite ,former French Vogue editor in chief and palpable are arselicker Joan Juliet Buck.

Here are some selected excerpts:

Asma al-Assad, Syria’s dynamic first lady, is on a mission to create a beacon of culture and secularism in a powder-keg region—and to put a modern face on her husband’s regime.

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies….She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.”

The Assads

It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark.

Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote. In Syria, power is hereditary.


The first impression of Asma al-Assad is movement—a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles. Dark-brown eyes, wavy chin-length brown hair, long neck, an energetic grace. No watch, no jewelry apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green. She’s breezy, conspiratorial, and fun. Her accent is English but not plummy. Despite what must be a killer IQ, she sometimes uses urban shorthand: “I was, like. . . .”

Asma Akhras was born in London in 1975, the eldest child and only daughter of a Syrian cardiologist and his diplomat wife. She grew up in Ealing, went to Queen’s College. She studied computer science at university, then went into banking..

She started dating a family friend: the second son of president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar, who’d cut short his ophthalmology studies in London in 1994 and returned to Syria after his older brother, Basil, heir apparent to power, died in a car crash.


The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls “active citizenship.” “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.”


Blah, blah blah, Louboutin, Chanel and other expensive brands the Killer comes in the next post

But clearly Joan Juliet Buck has the political nous of a maggot.

Murder in Syria

As the protests in the Middle East spread so does the repression of dissent. Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad is no exception meeting demonstrations in Damascus, and elsewhere with extreme violence

Thousands of protestors joined funeral processions in Deraa yesterday, chanting: "Deraa people are hungry, we want freedom." Hundreds took to the streets in the cities of Homs, Hama, Tel and Latakia and in towns surrounding Deraa, with smaller protests in the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo,

At least 23 people had been killed, some of them in Damascus. Amnesty International put the death toll around Deraa in the past week at 55 at least.

The violence in Syria came after the government had pledged on Thursday to look into reforms. "Regimes become really weak when their image turns to brutality. The killings in Deraa have done that," said Ziad Malki, an activist living in exile in Switzerland. "The Syrian people want more now."

Here’s hoping that Assad becomes another middle eastern leader to be consigned to the dustbin.

Syria: No More Fear

This is from a Reuters article regarding the popular mood in Syria, another country which has seen larger protests over the last few days

The preacher of the Saladin Mosque was reflecting on the joys of Mother's Day, his sermon straying far from dramatic protests now gripping Syria, when a young man jumped up to the pulpit and grabbed the microphone.

"Why are you talking about this in these circumstances? Tell us about the political situation!" shouted the youth, before secret police arrested him and hurried him away.

In Damascus, as in the provinces, a barrier of fear which had blocked dissent is breaking down. Uprisings across the Arab world have not stopped at the door of one of its most hardline administrations.

For the first time, placards other than those glorifying Syria's ruling elite and the "historic achievements" of the Baath Party are being raised in the towns of the strategic Hauran plain south of Damascus.

A single word is etched on them -- "Freedom."

The region,, has seen the first non-sectarian protests against the Baath Party since Assad's late father Hafez al-Assad crushed leftist and Islamist opponents in the 1980s.

"NO MORE FEAR"

In a sign of changing times, Montaha al-Atrash, whose father led a revolt against French rule in the 1920s, addressed Assad directly in an interview on BBC Television.

"Dr Bashar, listen to us. Non-stop pressure and repression will generate an explosion. You know, and you see how the region is boiling,"

Opposition figure Riad al-Turk, who spent 25 years as a political prisoner said Syrian leaders face "the moment of truth." 

"What is required is serious and clear steps to transform Syria from repression to democracy…. They are steps outlined repeatedly: release political prisoners, abolish the state of emergency, legalize a multi-party system, separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, and scrap the clause that makes the Baath Party 'leader of state and society'," he said. "All I know today is that Syria will not remain the kingdom of silence. Fear will no longer suffocate, and my homeland will not remain a big prison."

I wonder what will happen in Syria over the coming weeks, f I can’t see Assad going without bathing in the blood of a lot of ordinary Syrians,

Hobson’s choice, Damascus

High above the streets of Damascus Bashar al-Assad gazed benignly down from giant hoardings on his people. Banners praised "our Bashar", defender of sovereignty and stability. Nightly street parties, concerts, dabke dancing and rallies created a festive, jubilee-like atmosphere in the run-up to yesterday's presidential referendum.

No one was surprised that celebrations were taking place before a vote was cast; Assad was, the only candidate nominated by the ruling Ba'ath party, a party which greets opposition with a smile and a castration. The event is described in Arabic as "renewing the pledge of allegiance" (perhaps the ballot paper had a big “Ja” on it).

"We have our own style of democracy and we are proud of it," the information minister, Mohsen Bilal (isn’t it called dictatorship?) In 2000 President Assad created a dynasty by succeeding his father, Hafez. The referendum produced a comfortable 97.3% vote in favour. The official result this time is unlikely to stray far from that.

President Assad appears popular particularly with younger people, but there is no opinion and fear of the Mukhabarat secret police is pervasive. There is a joke in circulation about the man who once dared to tick the no box and was dragged back by his terrified mother to beg to be allowed to vote again. "Don't worry," the officials reply. "We've changed it for you - but just this once."

Talk of change, though, is met with warnings about Islamist extremism. There have been Islamist uprisings in Syria in the 60s and the 80s. Islamism is a threat to the Assad regime (there have been armed Islamist uprisings in Syria before) - Syrian jihadis who have returned from Iraq are a threat but perhaps Assad could show a little consistency by not supporting Hamas and Hezbollah (but then “my enemy’s enemy” and all that. ...).