Yep. It's a fact that QE2 was as fawning over the el Assads as a long list of other world leaders and celebrities at the time.
'The Syrian first couple was received by then-French president Jacques Chirac at the Elysee Palace in 2001, by Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in 2002, and by the King and Queen of Spain in 2004. She charmed world leaders at Pope John-Paul II’s funeral in 2005, and welcomed stars such as Sting, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to Damascus.'
Murdoch's Sun newspaper called her “the sexy Brit bringing Syria in from the cold”. Paris Match, a French language magazine, described her as “an element of light in a country full of shadows”. Days before the Syrian revolution erupted in March 2011, a gushing Vogue article headlined “A Rose in the Desert” called her “the freshest and most magnetic of First Ladies”.
But Bashar's reputation as a liberal was a carefully crafted fraud manufactured by Western PR companies and a compliant media as the intelligence agencies of those western leaders surely made known to them. But it suited them to turn a blind eye until the atrocities committed could no longer be plausibly denied.
What now for Asma al-Assad – the former British public schoolgirl turned pariah
The wife of Bashar al-Assad morphed from being Syria’s equivalent of Princess Diana into its Marie Antoinette.
