Assad lived in quiet luxury while Syrians went hungry

Bashar al-Assad, for all his autocratic power, cultivated a relatively modest public image.

He flaunted nothing like the mega-yachts and network of marble baroque and rococo palaces of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or the gaudy glamour and custom space-age private jet with nightclub-style lighting and silver armchairs of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi.

As Syria’s leader for nearly 25 years, Assad and his immediate family “lived, in a way, a normal life in front of people,” said Ammar Mahayni, a retired businessman who for decades lived a block away from the Assad family residence in Damascus. “His children went to normal schools” alongside ordinary if well-to-do Damascus residents, he said, rather than attend elite academies or boarding schools abroad. The family drove regular cars and wore plain “jeans and a T-shirt” out and about. “My sister used to see his daughter in a club swimming pool, sitting with her friends.”

But moderation is not what crowds of jubilant Syrians found when they streamed into the newly empty Assad family properties after his ouster this week, to marvel at their contents - and grab what they could, even chandeliers, according to photos taken at the scene and footage widely circulated online.

In a video posted to social media, a crowd of people rush up and down the staircase of one of Assad’s homes, including one person carrying out a large Louis Vuitton shopping bag. Another video at the same residence shows someone holding up a Dior garment bag. The Washington Post verified the location of the videos.

Looters, along with the simply curious, left in their wake a littering of boxes of designer items including from Hermes and Cartier, on top of a whirlwind of loose paper, smashed furniture and fallen portraits.

Video posted to Instagram shows an expansive garage filled with an array of luxury cars on the compound of Assad’s presidential palace. “Save me a Lamborghini,” one man calls out while driving through. The Post verified the video was filmed in the same structure that CNN reported was part of the presidential palace compound, where Aston Martins, Cadillacs, Lamborghinis and Ferraris were housed, but it’s unclear when exactly the video was taken.

“It was a surprise for us to see the garage full of cars because he never drove in fancy cars, or even his son,” Mahayni said. “Believe it or not, the people around him were more of a show-off than himself.”

While no fan of looting in general, Mahayni said he could recognize what some of the looters might have been thinking: “They were poor. He took everything. We had the right to take it.”

The Assad family long ran a complex patronage system, which included shell companies and facades. “These networks penetrate all sectors of the Syrian economy,” the State Department said in a 2022 report to Congress on the Assad family’s wealth. Citing reporting by nongovernmental organizations and the media, the department said this network “serves as a tool for the regime to access financial resources via seemingly legitimate corporate structures and non-profit entities.” The network’s companies were able to “launder money from illicit activities and funnel funds to the regime.”

Assad’s hidden life of luxury stands in stark contrast to life in the rest of his country.

The State Department in 2022 estimated the Assad family net worth to be between $1 billion and $2 billion. The department noted that the estimate’s imprecision reflected the spread and concealment of the extended family’s wealth across various real estate portfolios, corporations, accounts and tax havens, under different names or obscured ownership.

Compare that with the entire country’s GDP, which stood in 2021 at $9 billion - a precipitous drop from prewar figures many times higher. About 3 in four 4 require humanitarian assistance, and more than half struggle to find enough food, according to the United Nations.

[Assad’s collapse triggers race to find missing chemical weapons in Syria]

Many grievances over Assad’s rule centered on corruption, poverty and autocracy. “If you asked me, ‘How do you describe Bashar Assad,’ I would never talk about his lifestyle, because it didn’t matter,” Mahayni said. “What mattered is the secret police that he deployed, the different security departments he created.” As president, Assad cracked down on Arab Spring-era uprisings and waged a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Bashar and his wife, Asma al-Assad, long exerted major influence over the wealth of Syria.

“Bashar al-Assad is not known for flaunting his luxury lifestyle. … He is known, nonetheless, for extorting the business community, known for being exceptionally corrupt,” said Karam Shaar, a political economist and nonresident senior fellow at the New Lines Institute.

“One can argue that the only constant in Bashar al-Assad’s rule has been corruption,” Shaar said.

Assad utilized crony capitalism, allowing friends and relatives to benefit from the opening up of the country’s economy. Those profits translated to money for him personally and for those entwined in his web of patronage, and to fund the regime and the war - but did not translate to increased tax revenue for the state, Shaar added.

Asma al-Assad had major influence, such as over a committee meant to manage Syria’s economic crisis, including decisions on food and fuel subsidies, the State Department said.

An effusive 2011 Vogue profile of the first lady titled “A Rose in the Desert” - which was later taken down and mostly scrubbed from the internet - heralded the Assads’ supposed down-to-earth nature, a narrative the family was emphasizing even then.

“Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment,” the article says of Asma, referring to her as “a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement.”

The article’s publication came just before Assad’s deadly crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations, when Assad’s status as a violent authoritarian was cemented. The reporter of the article distanced herself from the article, and the Hill reported that the Syrian government paid an international lobbying firm to help arrange the interview.