Syria’s first lady, Asma al-Assad, has said that she rejected offers of asylum from opponents of her husband, Bashar, in her first interview in several years.
“I’ve been here since the beginning and I never thought of being anywhere else at all,” the the former investment banker told the Russian state-backed television channel Russia 24.
“Yes, I was offered the opportunity to leave Syria or rather to run from Syria. These offers included guarantees of safety and protection for my children and even financial security. It doesn’t take a genius to know what these people were really after. It was a deliberate attempt to shatter people’s confidence in their president.”
Asma al-Assad, 41, a dual British-Syrian national who was born and grew up in London, has rarely granted press interviews in recent years as the country descended into torment and civil war.
Her last major media appearance was a glowing 2011 profile in Vogue, titled A Rose in the Desert, that praised the Assad family as “wildly democratic” and lauded their reforms in Syria, before the magazine took down the article and erased its online presence as the violence worsened.
The daughter of a former diplomat and a Syrian Harley Street cardiologist, she was raised as a secular Muslim and spoke Arabic at home, but attended a Church of England school in west London, where fellow pupils knew her as Emma. After the private Queen’s College girl’s school in Marylebone and King’s College London, where she studied computer science, she embarked on a brief career as a banker with JP Morgan in London and New York.
She married Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, in December 2000 and has stood alongside him as hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the conflict. Her public role in recent months has centred around comforting the families of soldiers who were killed battling the insurgency. She was personally sanctioned by the European Union.
Her interview with Russia 24 comes as Assad’s forces are on the front foot as a result of the Kremlin’s intervention in the war in defense of Assad.
In the 30-minute fawning interview, the mother of three, speaking in English, condemned western sanctions against Syria, saying they hurt ordinary people, as well as western media coverage of the crisis, saying publications did not cover the suffering of civilians in regime-held parts of the country.
But in a conciliatory message, she acknowledged the suffering on both sides of the war. She described as a tragedy the death of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy whose iconic image after drowning off the Turkish coast came to represent the suffering of the refugee crisis, and the wounds of Omran Daqneesh, a boy who was the subject of a video that went viral after he was filmed with a bloodied face and in shock after an airstrike on his Aleppo home.
“There is not a family in Syria that has not lost a loved one,” she said. “Today parents are attending the funerals of their children rather than their weddings.” She said the severity of the humanitarian crisis in Syria was “unprecedented” and “beyond comprehension”.
The last month has seen eastern Aleppo, which is controlled by rebels, pounded by some of the heaviest aerial bombing since the start of the war. The Russian and Syrian air forces have deployed powerful weaponry including bunker-busting bombs that have killed and wounded hundreds of civilians, in a campaign meant to precede a ground assault by Shia militias allied with Iran and Syrian army soldiers.
Western powers have accused Russia of committing possible war crimes during the siege of Aleppo, which is completely cut off from surrounding areas.
Russia declared a brief eight-hour “humanitarian pause” in its airstrikes on Tuesday, ostensibly to allow civilians and repentant rebel fighters to leave the city. Residents in eastern Aleppo said the airstrikes had been halted in the morning. On Monday bombing killed several infants as well as 14 members of a single family, according to activists.
Growing frustration with the Russian campaign prompted the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, in a rare press conference in London, to say his country may step up its support for rebels on the ground in order to alter the balance of power.
