The rising influence of Mrs Assad

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘The rising influence of Mrs Assad’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Monday, April 10th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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China’s anti-corruption unit is rocking the country’s financial sector. Plus, we’re going to take a deep dive into why Syria’s first lady has become one of the most powerful people in the country.

Raya Jalabi
She was so ambitious and so brilliant and so clever and so charming that she sort of made a choice to stay and to grow her influence.

Marc Filippino
We’ll hear about the influence Asma al-Assad has over the country’s economy, finances and foreign aid flows. I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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Chinese president Xi Jinping thinks the country’s financial sector is failing the economy. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has been going after misconduct in finance, and the commission warns against, quote, “hedonism and high-end lifestyles”. OK, so those are some big words. But the commission has been backing them up, too. Since February, more than a dozen executives have been under investigation or penalised. Banks have also made big cuts to executive pay and bonuses. Now, a lot of this goes back to President Xi’s common prosperity drive that he launched in 2021. Since then, the commission has investigated more than 20 financial institutions. They include the central bank, stock exchanges, commercial banks and asset management companies.

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When Asma Akhras married Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in December 2000, she was seen as a stubborn young woman with lofty western ideals. But the striking British banker settled into life in Syria. Over time, she fashioned a public image of herself as the mother of the nation. But behind the scenes, Asma al-Assad has manoeuvred herself into a position of remarkable economic power. The FT’s Middle East correspondent Raya Jalabi has been investigating her rise and she joins me now. Hi, Raya.

Raya Jalabi
Hi, Marc.

Marc Filippino
So when did Asma al-Assad’s push for power begin?

Raya Jalabi
You know, from what we’ve heard from sources who knew her back in during her time in London and also in her early years in Damascus, she was quite frustrated by the limited role she was sort of being boxed into. She got to Damascus and it was a completely different, slightly more oppressive environment. And that had a lot to do with the fact that her mother-in-law was the sort of domineering figure that sort of very notorious in Syria for keeping a tight leash on her family’s activities.

Marc Filippino
OK. So she’s in Damascus, feels frustrated. What does she do?

Raya Jalabi
She sort of eventually starts building up a profile through a lot of charity work and working on NGOs. And of course, it’s important to remember that she had first started out as a banker. So in her early years before she married Bashar al-Assad, she had worked at Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan as an investment banker. So she knew her way around the economy and around business. So she starts sort of doing these initiatives in Syria, and most of them are sort of uncontroversial. They’re in tourism or education or culture, sort of like soft power in a sense.

Marc Filippino
So she was sort of a low-key first lady for many years. But then you write in your story that in 2016 there was this turning point. This is right when Syria’s in the most brutal part of its civil war. And for Asma al-Assad, something really significant happens.

Raya Jalabi
So her mother-in-law dies, so she passes away in 2016 and all of a sudden you see this shift in Asma’s positioning publicly. So she gets diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 and makes a very sort of public showing of this. It’s a fine line to toe in the Arab world because there’s still a lot of shame around on cancer and a lot of secrecy around medical diagnoses like this. But she was very public with it. So it is said that at that moment, having lived apart for a while during the war, the couple, Bashar and Asma, are reconnect during her diagnosis and during her cancer treatment. She’s wearing these scarves and is doing a lot of work with cancer-stricken children. And so, you know, this sort of public adoration increased. And then after that time, once the couple was sort of reunited and closer, she gets given parts of the economics portfolio of the country. And that’s really a very pivotal moment in her story.

Marc Filippino
But at that time in 2019, Syria was a mess. Its economy was in freefall. The government desperately needed cash. What is Asma al-Assad doing at this point?

Raya Jalabi
So at that moment, and with a smart sort of rise in stature, you start seeing a sort of co-ordinated, systematic asset seizure of the sort of traditional merchant class and the businessmen who’d been working alongside the regime for many years. So you start having these increasing shakedowns throughout that reverberate throughout that the Syrian business community.

Marc Filippino
So by this point, does Asma have an official position?

Raya Jalabi
She chairs this sort of secretive economic council. It’s essentially a council within the presidential palace that is staffed with their close acolytes and associates. And it’s a place where they sort of come up with policies, the shakedowns, the asset seizures. And it’s there that a lot of the backroom negotiation over control over the country’s economy happens. Because, of course, you have formal economic councils and you have formal policies that are made by the regime. But this is the sort of the secret room where the real, sort of real stuff was happening. There’s a group of people of Syrian businessmen and former aides in the first lady’s office who are close to her, who it said drum up business for her and front businesses for her. And that includes a telecoms company, smart card business. And the smart cards are essentially like a digital card where Syrians go to collect subsidised food rations. So there are a lot of businesses that are loosely associated with her. And, you know, throughout my reporting, people describe her fingerprints as being across multiple sectors of Syria’s economy. But her name isn’t actually ever on any of these documents or company records, but the names of her people known to be close to her are. So of course, there’s a lot of inference happening. But, you know, to get any business done in Syria today, you really have to go through the presidential palace.

Marc Filippino
So Asma al-Assad had tremendous power in the international community, too, especially when it comes to foreign aid. What can you tell us about that, Raya?

Raya Jalabi
You know, one of the main fields where she exerts her control in Syria is through the NGO sector. And she for many, many years has had incredible influence upon how foreign aid money trickles into the country and where it gets distributed. The regime forces international NGOs to partner with the Syria Trust for Development, which is her NGO that she founded in 2007. The regime sort of acts to prevent the equitable distribution of aid amongst all Syrian peoples and try to concentrate those efforts into areas where its base resides. And so if you’re a foreign government, seeing all of these things, the questions keep getting asked about why all of these international aid groups and why these international donor states will keep funnelling money into Syria if a lot of that ends up in regime hands.

Marc Filippino
So one of the craziest things about reading your story, Raya, was learning that Asma, the entire time that she’s been in Syria, has also retained her British citizenship.

Raya Jalabi
Yeah. I mean, I’ve been really interested to see a lot of FT commenters and a lot of people online have been discussing the fact that it’s almost hypocritical for the British government not to have revoked her citizenship, given her alleged complicity in a lot of the regime’s activities.

Marc Filippino
Right. This is such an interesting story because, you know, you have this woman, Asma, who is, she’s smart. She’s married into Syria’s regime. And she has to kind of figure out how to survive and how to channel her ambitions.

Raya Jalabi
She was so ambitious and so brilliant and so clever and so charming that she sort of made a choice to stay and to grow her influence. I mean, there were all these people who knew her in her early days in Damascus. They describe her as this, you know, wanting to be queenlike. So she sort of very much wanted to affiliate herself with Queen Rania of Jordan or Emine Erdoğan, whose profile was rising at the time because she was, you know, as she’s President Erdoğan’s wife. And so she aspired to be sort of an all-reigning queen, a woman much admired. And in 2011, things turn for the worse, you know, for the country. And so as a result, she’s been desperately trying to sort of maintain this public image of herself. So it’s just been a really interesting evolution.

Marc Filippino
Raya Jalabi is the FT’s Middle East correspondent. Thank you so much, Raya.

Raya Jalabi
Thanks, Marc.

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Marc Filippino
You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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