Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied on Monday reports that the wife of fugitive Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has filed for divorce and is leaving Russia for London, and that Russian authorities have imposed travel restrictions on him and frozen his assets. At a press conference Monday morning, Peskov said that these reports "do not correspond to reality."
Russia, was Assad's main ally, and in the middle of the last decade it mobilized to help his regime through a bombing campaign that seemed to have subdued the rebels and secured the dictator's future. When Assad's opponents launched a surprise attack on his forces last month, this time while Russia was mired in the war in Ukraine, Moscow failed to save him again, and at the last minute it evacuated him to its territory through its air force base in western Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin later granted political asylum to him, his wife Asma, and their three children – sons Hafez, 24, and Karim, 21, and daughter Zain, 22.
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The Assads were granted asylum in Russia
(Photos: Salah Malkawi/Getty Images, AP, Rami al Sayed / AFP)
On Sunday, Turkish media reported that, although the Syrian dictator has been granted asylum in Moscow, he is under close surveillance by the authorities there and is prohibited from leaving the Russian capital or engaging in any political activity. The reports also claimed that Assad's extensive assets have been frozen by the Russian government, a fact that further harms his quality of life and that of his family.
Against this backdrop, Turkish media reported that Asma Assad filed a formal request with a Russian court to divorce her husband, leave the country and travel to her homeland, Britain. Asma Assad holds British citizenship, and only moved to Syria in 2000, when she married the dictator, a few months after he came to power. At a press conference Monday morning, the Kremlin spokesman denied all these reports.
After the overthrow of Assad's regime earlier this month, foreign media reported that the U.S. State Department estimated that the fortune of the ousted president and his wife was around $2 billion, spread across a variety of bank accounts, shell companies, tax havens and real estate ventures across the globe, so it is likely that they still have access to vast sums of money. In addition, it was reported that Assad's extended family owns at least 20 apartments in Moscow, and that their net worth is close to $40 million. The reports in Turkey raise the question of whether his access to money and assets is now blocked, and where exactly he is staying in the Russian capital.
The move to Russia comes at a difficult time for the Assad family, not only because of the humiliating escape from Syria. In May of this year, Asma announced that she had been diagnosed with cancer for a second time, this time leukemia, and that she would be required to isolate herself and absent from events and activities. Her announcement comes almost five years after she announced that she had recovered from breast cancer, a disease that the Arab world followed closely during her illness. Some are now wondering whether Asma Assad will receive her treatments in Russia.
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Last week, after more than eight days of silence, the ousted dictator Assad made his first official statement about his whereabouts in Russia. A message posted on his office's Telegram channel claimed that he had not fled Syria at all, but had first tried to travel to the Syrian city of Latakia to "monitor the fighting from there," and that he had been forced to evacuate to Russia only because there was no way to leave the attacked Russian air base where he was staying, and because an order had come from Moscow to evacuate people from the facility.
In a statement he issued, Assad emphasized that he was the man who, from the first day of the Syrian civil war, "refused to negotiate to save his country for personal gain or to compromise on the future of his people," and that just as he "never abandoned the resistance in Palestine and Lebanon and did not betray the allies who stood by me, there is no chance that such a man would abandon his people or betray the army and his country." In his statement, he claimed that, by supporting his opponents, the world was in effect presenting terrorists as a revolutionary movement that was vying for his favor, and expressed hope "that Syria would once again be free and independent."