Assad family live in Russian luxury as Bashar ‘brushes up on ophthalmology’

In 2011, a group of teenage boys spray-painted a warning on to a wall in their school playground: “It’s your turn, Doctor.” The graffiti was a thinly veiled threat that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, a London-trained ophthalmologist, would be next in the line of Arab dictators toppled by the then raging Arab spring.

It took 14 years, during which 620,000 were killed and nearly 14 million displaced, but eventually the doctor’s turn came and Assad was deposed, fleeing to Moscow in the middle of the night.

But after relinquishing his dictatorship for a gilded exile in Moscow, Assad is reportedly giving his medical training another go. The leader of the Middle East’s last Ba’athist regime now sits in the classroom, taking ophthalmology lessons, according to a well-placed source.

“He’s studying Russian and brushing up on his ophthalmology again,” said a friend of the Assad family who has kept in touch with them. “It’s a passion of his, he obviously doesn’t need the money. Even before the war in Syria began, he used to regularly practice his ophthalmology in Damascus,” they continued, suggesting the wealthy elite in Moscow could be his target clientele.

A year after his regime was toppled in Syria, the Assad family are living an isolated, quiet life of luxury in Moscow and the UAE. A friend of the family, sources in Russia and Syria, as well as leaked data, helped give rare insight into the lives of the now reclusive family who once ruled over Syria with an iron fist.

The family are likely to reside in the prestigious Rublyovka, a gated community of Moscow’s elite, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation. There they would rub shoulders with the likes of the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled Kyiv in 2014 and is believed to live in the area.

The Assads are not wanting for money. After being cut off from much of the world’s financial system by western sanctions in 2011 after Assad’s bloody crackdown on protesters, the family put much of their wealth in Moscow, where western regulators could not touch it.

Despite their cushy abode, the family are cut off from the elite Syrian and Russian circles they once enjoyed. Bashar’s 11th-hour flight from Syria left his cronies feeling abandoned and his Russian handlers prevent him from contacting senior regime officials.

“It’s a very quiet life,” said the family friend. “He has very little, if any, contact with the outside world. He’s only in touch with a couple of people who were in his palace, like Mansour Azzam [former Syrian minister of presidency affairs] and Yassar Ibrahim [Assad’s top economic crony].”

A source close to the Kremlin said Assad was also largely “irrelevant” to Putin and Russia’s political elite. “Putin has little patience for leaders who lose their grip on power, and Assad is no longer seen as a figure of influence or even an interesting guest to invite to dinner,” the source said.

Assad fled with his sons out of Damascus in the early hours of 8 December 2024, as Syrian rebels approached the capital from the north and the south. They were met by a Russian military escort and were taken to the Russian Khmeimim airbase, where they were flown out of the country.

Assad did not warn his extended family or close regime allies of the impending collapse, instead leaving them to fend for themselves.

A friend of Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s brother and a top military official, who knows many former members of the palace said: “Maher had been calling Bashar for days but he wouldn’t pick up. He stayed in the palace until the last second, rebels found his shisha coals still warm. It was Maher, not Bashar, who helped others escape. Bashar only cared about himself.”

The lawyer of Bashar’s uncle Rifaat al-Assad recalled how his clients called him in a panic, unsure of how to escape Syria after Bashar fled. “When they arrived to Khmeimim, they told the Russian soldiers that they were Assads, but they didn’t speak English or Arabic. So eight of them had to sleep in their cars in front of the base,” Elie Hatem, Rifaat’s lawyer said. It was only after the intervention of a senior Russian official that the family managed to escape to Oman.

In the first months after the Assads’ escape, his former regime allies were not on Bashar’s mind. The family gathered in Moscow to support Asma, the British-born former first lady of Syria, who had had leukaemia for years and whose condition had become critical. She had been receiving treatment in Moscow before the fall of the Assad regime.

According to a source familiar with the details of Asma’s health, the former first lady has recovered after experimental therapy under the supervision of Russia’s security services

With Asma’s health stabilised, the former dictator is keen to get his side of the story out. He has lined up interviews with RT and a popular rightwing American podcaster, but is waiting for approval from Russian authorities to make a media appearance.

Russia appears to have blocked Assad from any public appearance. In a rare November interview with Iraqi media about Assad’s life in Moscow, Russia’s ambassador to Iraq, Elbrus Kutrashev, confirmed that the toppled dictator was barred from any public activity.

“Assad may live here but cannot engage in political activities … He has no right to engage in any media or political activity. Have you heard anything from him? You haven’t, because he is not allowed to – but he is safe and alive,” Kutrashev said.

Life for the Assad children in contrast seems to continue with relatively little disruption, as they adjust to a new life as Moscow elite.

The family friend, who met some of the children a few months ago, said: “They’re kind of dazed. I think they’re still in a bit of a shock. They’re just kind of getting used to life without being the first family.”

The only time the Assad family – without Bashar – have been seen together in public since the end of their regime was at his daughter Zein al-Assad’s graduation on 30 June, where she received a degree in international relations from MGIMO, the elite Moscow university attended by much of Russia’s ruling class.

A photograph on MGIMO’s official website shows the 22-year-old Zein standing with other graduates. In a blurry separate video from the event, members of the Assad family, including Asma and her two sons Hafez, 24, and Karim, 21, can be seen in the audience.

Two of Zein’s classmates who attended the ceremony confirmed that parts of the Assad family were present, but said they kept a low profile. “The family did not stay long and did not take any pictures with Zein on stage like other families,” said one of the former classmates, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Hafez, once groomed as Bashar’s potential successor, has largely withdrawn from public view since posting a Telegram video in February in which he offered his own account of the family’s flight from Damascus, denying they had abandoned their allies and claiming it was Moscow that ordered them to leave Syria.

Syrians quickly geolocated Hafez, who took the video while walking the streets of Moscow.

Hafez has closed most of his social media, instead registering accounts under a pseudonym taken from an American children’s series about a young detective with dyslexia, according to leaked data. The children and their mother spend much of their time shopping, filling their new Russian home with luxury goods, according to the source close to the family.

Zein al-Assad regularly shops for high-end clothing, has registered at an upmarket pedicure salon and is a member an elite gym in Moscow, leaked Russian data shows.

The Assad children also frequently visit the UAE, with Asma joining them on their trip on at least one occasion. Leaked flight records seen by the Guardian from 2017-23 suggest the UAE had long become a favourite destination for the Assad family even when they were in power. Karim and Hafez made repeated trips between Abu Dhabi, Moscow and Syria, including flights in November 2022 and September 2023.

Originally, the Assad family were hoping to relocate from Moscow to the UAE. The UAE was a much more familiar location for them. They did not speak Russian and struggled to locate themselves within Russian social circles, according to the family friend. However, the family now realise that permanently relocating will not happen for a while, as even the UAE, which houses many of the world’s shady elite, is uncomfortable hosting Assad.

As rebels swept across Syria, they shared pictures they found in Assad’s estates. Social media was flooded with images of a young Bashar in underwear, Bashar swimming – a far cry from the autocratic self-portrait that stared out at Syrians from every corner.

It was the first crack in a steely image of a dictator whose rule, until a year ago, was seen as impregnable. Syrians, however, still have few details about the man who oversaw 14 years of killing that left hundreds of thousands of Syrians dead.

Kamal Alam, a former non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who engaged in track two diplomacy during the Syrian civil war, said: “It took the fall of the regime for those pictures to come out. I would say that the family is very private and they never liked to be exposed and they still won’t going forward.”

[Source: The Guardian]