Assad’s private mails turn public property
The life of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his British-born wife Asma has been revealed in detail as thousands of emails, purported to be from private email accounts of the Assads and their close aides, have been disclosed by Syrian Opposition activists.
The emails, more than 3,000, were said to have been intercepted by members of the Syrian opposition group, Supreme Council of the Revolution, between June last year and early February this year. The Opposition activists claimed that they were passed username and password details believed to have been used by the Assads by a mole in the President’s inner circle.
The emails, which were published by The Guardian, reveal that Mr Assad had received advice from Iran on several occasions during the growing crisis over revolt against his government.
The newspaper said it had made extensive efforts to authenticate the emails by checking their contents against established facts and contacting 10 individuals whose correspondence appears in the cache. These checks suggest the messages are genuine, it said.
“Before a speech in December his media consultant prepared a long list of themes, reporting that the advice was based on ‘consultations with a good number of people in addition to the media and political adviser for the Iranian ambassador,’” the report said.
The emails also show that Hussein Mortada, an influential Lebanese businessman with strong connections to Iran, had urged Assad to stop blaming al-Qaeda for twin car bombings in Damascus.
The Syrian regime has been accused of deliberately targeting journalists covering the resistance and the emails seem to reveal that this is a fact.
President Assad was briefed in detail about the presence of Western journalists in the Baba Amr district of Homs. Two journalists, Marie Colvin from the United States and Remi Ochlik from France, were killed in shelling said to be directed by the government troops on February 22. Another journalist, Gilles Jacquier, was also killed in Syria and at present two Turkish journalists reporting from Syria are missing.
Forty-six-year-old President Assad and his wife were also shown by the emails to be shopping on Internet for Harry Potter films, designer goods like Christian Louboutin shoes, fondue sets, ming vases and downloading music from iTunes as the violence in the country escalated. President Assad sidestepped extensive US sanctions against him by using a third party with a US address to make purchases of music and apps from Apple’s iTunes.
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