Russia keeps the address deliberately blurred but Bashar al-Assad, the deposed Syrian despot and accused war criminal, is living in gilded limbo in Moscow, apparently dividing his time between a luxury Moscow tower block and a sumptuous mansion behind barbed wire in the city’s exclusive western “dacha belt”.
His host, President Putin, another leader wanted for alleged war crimes, granted him sanctuary on “humanitarian grounds” when he fled his country in December last year with Asma, his London-born wife, and their three children, as rebels closed in on the Syrian capital.
But now the French judicial authorities have rattled the gates of their Russian hideaway. On Tuesday magistrates issued arrest warrants for Assad, his younger brother Maher and five other former henchmen over the artillery strike that killed Marie Colvin, the intrepid foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer, in the Syrian city of Homs in 2012.
• Final dispatch from Homs, the battered city
Colvin started working for The Sunday Times in the 1980s, going on to interview leaders including Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat
IVOR PRICKETT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Moscow scoffs at European warrants and the values they embody and is unlikely to give up the cosseted Syrians, the latest members of a rough menagerie of unsavoury ex-heads of state and former officials under Kremlin protection. While Europe has branded Assad a butcher who presided over the gassing, torture and murder of tens of thousands of his countrymen, Putin has rolled out a red carpet for a family who, perhaps guessing long ago that they might need a Russian bolthole, invested more than $40 million in luxury Moscow tower blocks with discreet elevators and private security just a short drive from the dacha retreat.
Assad’s eldest son, Hafez, studied mathematics at Moscow’s state university while living in one of the family’s 19 opulent flats in “Moscow City”, a development that began in the early 1990s and is a forest of glass-and-steel spires on the Moskva River, a self-contained district of offices, hotels, flats and shopping centres. Assad’s psychotic younger brother Maher, who was tasked with regime “dirty work” — and fled Damascus with the rest of the family — is rumoured to occupy another of the family flats: a Kurdish politician recently posted a video online showing a man she identified as Maher dining in a plush shisha café in one of the malls.
Assad in 2017 with President Putin, who welcomed him to Moscow in December
MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/REUTERS
But while the family might feel relatively secure under Putin’s protection, the arrest warrants resulting from a long-running French judicial investigation are an unwelcome reminder of how the world beyond Moscow has shrunk for them. Britain has frozen more than £160 million in assets linked to former Syrian regime figures and French and Spanish courts have seized Assad properties worth more than $810 million.
• My school photo with Asma al-Assad, the ‘first lady of hell’
Asma al-Assad, 50, a British citizen, was diagnosed with myeloid leukemia in May last year. But the British authorities have said she is “not welcome” should she seek treatment in London, the longstanding destination of choice for well-heeled patients from the Middle East; and her 59-year-old husband is unable to go anywhere in Europe without the risk of being put in handcuffs.
Asma al-Assad, the wife of the former dictator, is undergoing treatment in Moscow for blood cancer
MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
“These French warrants have real-world effects,” said Paul Conroy, a photographer who was seriously injured while accompanying Colvin for The Sunday Times in Homs. He remembers being interviewed years ago by a French investigating magistrate and was “astonished” to receive an email on Tuesday from a lawyer announcing a concrete result: seven arrest warrants for Assad and his cronies.
“I’m obviously delighted and Marie’s family will be too,” he added over the phone from Kramatorsk in Ukraine: in spite of nearly losing his leg in Homs, he has continued reporting from the world’s hotspots and is chronicling Russia’s indiscriminate shelling of civilians. “It may be a slow burn,” he said of the legal process. “But some day what they [the Assad regime] did will catch up with them. Nobody ever thought [Radovan] Karadzic and [Ratko] Mladic would be arrested,” he added, referring to Serbian war criminals of the 1990s Balkan conflict. After long being thought untouchable they are now serving life sentences.
The killing of Colvin, 56, was no accident.
In a case brought by her sister, Cat, a federal court in America ruled in 2019 that Colvin, an American citizen, and the few other journalists who were smuggled by rebels though an underground tunnel into the beleaguered Baba Amr district of Homs had been deliberately targeted to prevent them exposing the barbarity of a regime pulverising civilian districts with artillery fire. Detailed testimony exposed how Assad’s soldiers were ordered to target a makeshift media centre where the journalists were staying.
Paul Conroy with Colvin in Libya in 2011
PAUL CONROY FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
One of the French arrest warrants is for Rafiq Mahmoud Shahadah, the Homs former head of security. He hosted a celebration in his office after the attack in which he said: “Marie Colvin was a dog and now she’s dead.” A few days later, another of the officers involved in the killing received his reward: a luxury Hyundai Genesis sedan car from Maher al-Assad. As former commander of the Syrian army’s fourth division, Maher was the regime’s hardline enforcer accused by rights groups of ordering “shoot-to-kill” crackdowns, torture and suspected chemical attacks.
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Colvin, who grew up in Oyster Bay on Long Island, New York, and graduated from Yale University, made a career out of going where civilians were trapped and governments tried to hide evidence. A film, A Private War, would later introduce her to those who had somehow missed her reporting for The Sunday Times over nearly three decades from hotspots such as Chechnya, Iraq and Libya. In 1999, she stayed in a UN compound with 1,500 women and children in East Timor until their evacuation was secured.
Colvin lost her left eye to shrapnel in Sri Lanka in 2001 but kept filing, her black eye patch becoming an emblem of courage. The mortar round that took her life was evidence of the extremes to which a ruthless government would go to silence independent eyewitness journalists such as Colvin, wrote Lindsey Hilsum, her friend and fellow foreign correspondent, in her biography, In Extremis.
“It’s clear the journalists were targeted because they were telling the truth about the regime’s attacks on civilians in this part of Homs,” she said in an interview. On the evening before Colvin was killed, she had conducted an interview on American television, describing scenes she had just witnessed in a makeshift clinic where children were among the casualties, including a baby that had died in front of her. “That was a fatal mistake, the Syrians were able to trace the satellite signal,” Hilsum said.
Conroy’s final film of Colvin in Homs
PAUL CONROY FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
• Bashar al-Assad’s rise from London ‘IT geek’ to brutal Syrian dictator
Colvin would have loved nothing more than to cover the revolution in Syria, which today is staggering into a fraught transition, half-rebuilt and half-broken, while a provisional government has taken shape combining some of the rival fiefdoms. When Hilsum visited Baba Amr, its people were still talking about Colvin. “They adored her: the way they saw it was that she had sacrificed her life for them.”
Beyond Syria, Colvin “would have been beside herself about not getting into Gaza”, added her friend. Israel has refused to allow journalists into the war-ravaged territory.
Hilsum believes that while Assad has not moved from his hideout, the law has come closer, challenging the presumption that a leader who carried out chemical attacks and starved cities can retire to a Moscow bolthole with impunity for the rest of his life.
“As he sits in Moscow under the protection of a fellow war criminal, he might quite like the idea of travelling somewhere, particularly considering the condition of his wife. But he can’t. And that’s something.”