Asma and Bashar al-Assad (Polaris/Eyevine/File)
London’s Metropolitan Police have opened a preliminary investigation into possible war crimes by Asma al-Assad, the British-born wife of Syria’s leader Bashar al Assad.
The investigation is based on a complaint by Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers that Asma al-Assad is among “influential actors” supporting and encouraging terrorism and war crimes, during her husband’s lethal suppression of the Syrian uprising since 2011.
The attorneys told Sky News:
This is an important step in holding senior political officials accountable for their acts and ensuring that a state, through an independent and impartial legal process, takes responsibility for the acts of its own nationals.
As Asma al-Assad is a British national, it is important that she faces prosecution if the evidence supports the allegation and not merely stripped of her citizenship. This is an important process and it is only right that justice is served before an English court.
The Metropolitan Police Service confirmed that its War Crimes Unit is acting on the basis of the complaint filed at the end of July 2020.
Controlling Humanitarian Funds
Asma al-Assad, originally from Acton in west London, married Bashar in December 2000. During Syria’s 10-year conflict, the former investment banker has expanded her influence through control of humanitarian assistance, handling the funds through her Syria Trust for Development. In 2016 alone, the Trust was awarded $751,129 by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
See also UN Agencies Have Surrendered to Assad Regime — and Syrians Are Paying The Price
The Economist’s Nicholas Pelham explains:
When you have a totalitarian regime that the lines that are drawn between the public and private purse are pretty much invisible. If the UN wants to keep operating in Syria, they need to ensure that she is on-site. They’ve been paying her foundation, the Syria Trust, increasing sums of money year after year to retain their position.
Because of her role in the transactions, Asma al-Assad has been sanctioned by the US and European Union since 2012. The US expanded the sanctions on her, as well as on other Assad family members and the Central Bank, last December.
The Assad and Akhras families have accumulated their ill-gotten riches at the expense of the Syrian people through their control over an extensive, illicit network with links in Europe, the Gulf, and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the Syrian people continue to wait in long lines for bread, fuel, and medicine as the Assad regime chooses to cut subsidies for these basic essentials that Syrians need.
US Sanctions Syria’s Central Bank, Top Regime Official, and Asma al-Assad and Her Family
Oh that sucks! One minute to be part of the jet-setating glbal elite who can pluder whole countirs and the world and torture and kill with impunity, and the next munute the rest of the globla elite turns its back on you and syas, “You know that thing called law that we apply to everybody else to protect ourselves but not to us? Well, evey now and again one f us has to face the law to cionvince everyone else to be bound by it and you’ve drawn the shortest straw this time. Of course you can still lfeast in a palace in Syria while nearly eberyone else starves and lives in rubble and their own shit and bodies of the people you and your friends and allies (and we) tore to pieces, but set foot in the UK and you’ll be doing jail time and to make sure this never happoens we’re taking your UK passport away.”
The accusation might be true for all I know, but why wait until now to do anything about it? Even now, the UK has to be prdeed by the Guernica city council into doing something?! And that promting is more than a little late in the coming. Or is it? Because after 10 years of war and with the revolution already almost completely strangled, now it can safely be done without making any difference to what actually happens in Syria. This from one of the same govenements that systematically blocked Syrian rebels from obtaining anti-aircraft weapons that could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and that even bombed the country themselves… It’s not that I feel sorry for Her Majesty Queen Trophy – Indeed I can even laugh a bit at His Majesty’s means of being an honorary European, and distancing himself pycholgically from the nation he rules over, now snubbed – but the announcements still reeks of hypocrisy. These are partners in crime distracting from their guilt by pointing fingers at each other:I t’s all for show an not because they care about the victims at all.
Cool, but no one deserves a pat on the back for investigating HR abuses of the enemy. If the UK was interested in human rights as anything other than a cynically deployed political tool to score points, they’d be very busy investigating countless cases of their allies continuously & intentionally butchering innocents, like just this week! The human rights concerns about civilian victims suddenly plummet when the bullets they were killed with were paid for by the CIA, don’t they? 🙁