London: On November 27 last year, a young, ambitious woman sent an email to her boss. It contained a single link, to a piece by the BBC correspondent Paul Woods. He had been smuggled into the Syrian city of Homs. His subsequent report gave a vivid account of the smouldering rebellion there, crushed two months later in a remorseless government attack.
The woman was Hadeel Al Ali; her boss was Syria's president Bashar Al Assad. The email was sent to a private email account used by Al Assad to communicate with his wife Asma, other family members, and a handful of trusted advisers. Some 3,000 emails from Al Assad and his inner circle were leaked by Syria's opposition to the Guardian last week, revealing a first family strangely disconnected from the bloody drama engulfing Syria and its people.
This particular email appears to show Al Assad was personally told about the presence of Western journalists in Homs, slipping in via a perilous crossing from Lebanon. In retrospect, it takes on a darker aspect. In February the Sunday Times' Marie Colvin and the French photographer Remi Ochlik died in Homs when Syrian forces — it appears deliberately — targeted their building.
Reliant
One of the most striking aspects of the emails' leak is how Al Assad bypassed his male aides. Instead, as his country slipped further into bloodshed, he appears to have grown increasingly reliant on media advice from a group of young, Westernised Syrian expatriates. Most are women. At their core are Hadeel, who is educated in the United States, and her friend, Sheherazad Jaafari, a former intern at the New York-based PR firm Brown Lloyd James.
Of the two, Sheherazad had the better connections: her father is Syria's ambassador to the UN in New York, with a hotline to the leader in Damascus. But Hadeel's biography and now-deleted Facebook page offer clues as to her rapid rise.
Like Al Assad and much of the ruling elite, Hadeel is from the Alawite religious sect. She grew up in the coastal town of Qurdaha, known for its Alawite population.
Friends describe her as smart, smooth and sexy. "She was always going to excel in media and PR," one says. "She has clearly made use of her intellect."
Photos posted on her vanished Facebook page show Hadeel and Sheherazad holidaying together in the souqs of Iran, and strolling in the Syrian coastal town of Latakia.
When Syria's uprising began, however, something changed. Hadeel quickly became active in spreading pro-regime articles, sometimes with a shrill voice, sometimes dispassionately. She dumped friends she believed sympathetic to the opposition. Her private emails to Syria's president, "the dude" as Hadeel calls him in one Facebook post, reveal a strong personal and political commitment to him, and to his survival.
Regular feedback
As Syria's crisis darkened, it appears Hadeel turned down a place at Erasmus University in Warsaw last September to stay at the president's side. She and Sheherazad gave him regular feedback on how his speeches were perceived by supporters. She passed on requests for interviews from journalists deemed to be acceptable to the regime — and to its narrative that rebel fighters are all violent "terrorists" and Islamist extremists.
In late December she gives him strategic advice on a speech. She urges him to mention that "hostility to Israel" must be a key idea for the Syrian people, and tells him to sound "balanced and rational" when setting out his "reforms".
After the speech in January, Hadeel privately strikes a more intimate note, and compliments him on his choice of suit and healthy complexion. She is proud of his "strength wisdom and charisma".
Mysterious car bombings
Additionally, Hadeel is the conduit through which advice from Iran appears to reach Al Assad. Hussain Mortada, head of the Iranian-backed Al Alam satellite channel, says it is not in the regime's interests to blame a string of mysterious car bombings on Al Qaida. Mortada also talks of his links to Hezbollah and Tehran. It is Hadeel who forwards his emails to the boss, using the president's secret sam@alshahba.com account.
The leak of their private exchanges will be mortifying for Hadeel and Sheherazad. Neither has commented publicly since the scandal broke.
Nonetheless, it appears that the liberal education that they acquired in the United States hasn't so far translated into any sympathy for Al Assad's opponents. Instead, both have linked their destinies with Al Assad, a man who for now at least appears to be prevailing mercilessly over his enemies.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
