Asma Al Assad, wife of Bashar, has malignant breast cancer tumour
A statement by the Syrian presidency said the tumour was discovered early
Syria’s first lady, Asma Al Assad, has begun treatment for cancer, state media reported yesterday.
A statement by the Syrian presidency said “the first lady began the first stage treatment for a malignant tumour of the breast, which was discovered early”.
In a photograph published by the presidency’s Twitter account, Mrs Al Assad, 42, is seen smiling and sitting next to her husband, President Bashar Al Assad, in what appears to be a hospital room.
Public announcements disclosing personal matters of political elites are uncommon in the Arab world.
The presidency did not specify where Mrs Al Assad was being treated, but the word “military” was printed on a blanket visible in the picture, indicating she was probably in a government-run military hospital.
While the pair were tipped as potential reformers when Mr Al Assad took office in 2000, the changes never appeared. In the early days of the Syrian war, many suggested Mrs Al Assad was ignorant of the decisions her husband was taking. In a video in 2012, the British and German ambassadors to the UN appealed to her to speak out against the violence. The idea she did or does not know of the extent of the war has now largely been discounted.
In a now infamous interview with Vogue magazine in February 2012 – as the government began cracking down on the nascent uprising – Mrs Al Assad was described as “a rose in
the desert” and “wildly democratic”.
Just six months later, the writer of the Vogue story, Joan Juliet Buck, would describe Mrs Al Assad again in a story for The
Telegraph. In her account of the meeting and Syria’s subsequent plunge into war, Buck said she now saw Mrs Al Assad as the “first lady of hell”.
Born in 1975, the former investment banker styled herself as a progressive rights advocate and was seen as the modern side of the Assad dynasty.
While she was largely out of the public eye in the early years of the conflict, recently she has been pictured undertaking heavily staged charity work widely covered by government-run media.
Mrs Al Assad was born and raised in London to Syrian parents before moving to Syria after meeting Mr Al Assad.
The pair married in 2000 and have three children.