Asma al-Assad, Syria’s now-ousted first lady, was known as the “Imelda Marcos of Syria” and is “much more cutthroat” than her notorious dictator husband — once demanding full editorial control over a controversial Vogue spread, according to sources.
Anna Wintour’s magazine published a gushing 2,000-word interview and glossy photo shoot with Asma, entitled “A Rose in the Desert,” in March 2011, only for the story to be scrubbed from the Web weeks later.
Former French Vogue Editor Joan Juliet Buck was sent to Damascus to interview London-born Asma, and described her as “the very freshest and most magnetic of first ladies.”
The article, which called the Assads “wildly democratic,” was published two months after the Arab Spring uprising and just as President Assad’s bloody crackdown on Syrian dissidents began.
By the time it hit newsstands, his regime had reportedly killed more than 5,000 civilians, including hundreds of children.
It later emerged that the Washington, DC, publicity firm Brown Lloyd James was paid $5,000 a month to broker the feature for the Assads.
“I was on a conference call with her [Asma] and I can tell you that she is much more cutthroat than her husband,” an insider familiar with the project told The Post. “Normally, when you are setting up an interview with Vogue, it’s a friendly conversation. She wanted editorial control over everything — and she got it.”
Following outcry over the feature, Vogue did not renew Buck’s contract. The timing also caused chaos within the corridors of Condé.
“I don’t think Vogue really thought about it in political terms,” said a publishing source. “I think they thought it was a way to cover a fashionable Middle Eastern woman who wasn’t Queen Rania of Jordan [who has been covered by Vogue many times].
“I don’t think there was anyone there at the time who really questioned anything.”
The Post has reached out to Buck, Vogue and Brown Lloyd James for comment.
Asma has been known for her high spending on luxury items and a particular penchant for designer shoes.
“She had over 300 pairs and everyone used to joke she was the Imelda Marcos of Syria,” a London socialite told The Post.
As Buck later said: “I think that Vogue is always on the lookout for good-looking first ladies because they’re a combination of power and beauty and elegance.
“That’s what Vogue is about. And here was this woman who had never given an interview, who was extremely thin and very well-dressed and therefore, qualified to be in Vogue. And … Vogue had been trying to get her for quite a long time.”
Asma Akhras was born in West London in 1975, to a cardiologist father and diplomat mother. (Sources told The Post the couple has joined their daughter and her family in Moscow following the weekend’s coup.)
According to reports, Asma — who earned a degree in computer science at King’s College, London — called herself Emma while at school. She was working in finance for JP Morgan when she began a romance with the future dictator, who was then training as an eye doctor in London in 1992.
He would later tell Buck that he went into optometry because “there is very little blood.”
When Assad’s father, Hafez, who had ruled Syria since 1971, died in 2000, the son was elected president in a landslide — and married Asma, who had planned to study for an MBA at Harvard, months later.
The two share sons Hafez, 23, and Karim, 19, and daughter Zein, 21.
Janine di Giovanni, a former war correspondent who covered Syria under al-Assad and has written two books on the subject, told The Post that Asma reportedly attempted to flee the country at the beginning of the civil war in 2012 — but was stopped by her brother-in-law, who was in charge of Fourth Armored Division and controlled the military.
“The story that went around was that she was bruised when she came back,” said di Giovanni.
Emails obtained by WikiLeaks in 2012 revealed that Asma had joked to a friend: “I am the real dictator!”
The emails allegedly showed that Asma spent around $500,000 (adjusted for inflation) on furniture from an exclusive London store for her summer palace in the coastal town of Latakia in March 2011, just as Syria was embroiled into a bloody civil war.
She also splashed out on paintings, jewelry and Christian Louboutin shoes through intermediaries in Paris and London during the conflict.
“People knew about her spending but it was quite hard to get to know the real Asma. They are quite a private, almost insular family. Keep very much to themselves,” the London socialite said.
One assistant at a high-end London jewelry store who often served Asma told The Post she was “quiet and demure” — adding, “She isn’t difficult or grand, although she was a big spender.”
According to di Giovanni, Asma “is highly intelligent and had to have been fully aware of what her husband was doing. She could have escaped to a foreign embassy — she is British. But she never did.
“She decided to stay with her husband. How could you live with a mass murderer who tortured children?”
When the Vogue article came out, the magazine defended it initially. But in 2013, Wintour admitted, “Subsequent to our interview, as the terrible events of the past year and a half unfolded in Syria, it became clear that [the Assad regime’s] priorities and values were completely at odds with those of Vogue.”
“We took the piece down when we realized that the world had changed,” a Vogue source told The Post Monday.
“I don’t think I should have gone near the Assads,” Buck told NPR in April 2012, as she claimed that the Assad children she met during her reporting were not those in the pictures used in Vogue. She also alleged that her laptop had been tampered with while in Syria, and that “the devil and his wife” had showed off their fantasy life to her.
A former Condé staffer told The Post, “No one high up on the business or publishing side [of Vogue] would look at the magazine until it was in galley form — it was all the editorial team. So they wouldn’t have known the piece was running, and by then the chance of having a piece killed would have been so unusual.”
“The fact that this piece was taken off Vogue’s archives shows just how seriously Condé took this problem,” another former exec agreed.
