LONDON, (Reuters) – Syrian estrangement from fellow Arab leaders is a deeply personal affair, as apparently hacked emails between President Bashar al-Assad and his wife illustrate.
Few relationships have turned as sour as between Damascus and the Gulf state of Qatar, whose fabulously wealthy emir was once among Assad’s closest friends and investors but now leads a push to oust him, by force if necessary, after a year of revolt.
A three-word email from Asma al-Assad to her husband on Dec. 11, forwarding a solicitous message from a daughter of the emir – part of a trove of hacked correspondence obtained by Britain’s Guardian newspaper and seen by Reuters on Friday – betrays the couple’s bitter mood toward Qatar: “For a laugh…,” Asma wrote above the email, which gave assurances of the emir’s friendship. Her sarcasm strikes a jarring note amid a string of personal messages between the Syrian first lady and the Qatari princess, Mayassa al-Thani, in which they exchange warm greetings and news of their young children – messages which, however, are unlikely to have been sent from Qatar without the emirate’s rulers being well aware of their value as a “back-channel” for diplomacy.
A recurring theme of Thani’s correspondence – among some 3,000 emails between the Assads’ inner circle whose authenticity the Guardian has established – is urging her Syrian friend to flee the country with her husband; “Please get the kids out before it’s too late,” she wrote in August. On Jan. 30, Thani assured Assad of a welcome in the Qatari capital Doha.
Such an outcome to the conflict, which has cost 8,000 lives and raised tensions between Assad’s Shi’ite Iranian allies and the Sunni Muslim Gulf states, would suit Qatar. The emir, who sent troops and arms to Libya’s rebels last year, has pressed for military intervention to end the bloodshed in Syria.
FRIENDS
In the email exchange in December, at a time when Qatar was pushing the Arab League to punish Syria, Asma al-Assad referred to Qatar not “playing its cards right”. A few hours later, the emir’s daughter replied: “Your last remark is unfair. My father regards President Bashar as a friend, despite the current tensions – he always gives him genuine advice.”
It was that email, which urged the Assads to “come out of the state of denial” and apologised for “harsh” honesty, that Asma forwarded to Bashar suggesting he would find it amusing.
But three days later she replied: “My dear Mayassa, I don’t have a problem with frankness or honesty, in fact to me it’s like oxygen – I need it to survive … Take care, aaa.”
Talk of personal ties also clouds relations with Turkey, another regional player which once took a lead in trying to draw Assad out of an earlier isolation. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan once invited the Assads to a holiday resort in Turkey. But, asked by Thani if she could pass her email address to Erdogan’s wife, Asma al-Assad replied in personal terms: “I use this account only for family and friends. It would be difficult for me at this stage to consider her in either category after the insults they have directed towards the president.”
JOKES
If there is a sense of scorn for friends who have fallen out, the email cache, running for about nine months until early February, when the Assads realised they had been compromised, offers a picture of warm, light-hearted, at times flirtatious, relationships between the couple and a small group of aides.
While Asma, 36, orders luxury goods from abroad – her main buyer appears to have her stored in his email address book as “Party party” – Bashar, 46, indulges eclectic musical tastes on iTunes via a sanction-busting address on New York’s Fifth Avenue. They range from country laments to New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” and LMFAO’s party-rock hit “Sexy And I Know It”.
