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    Assad emails: Asma al-Assad, Syrian leader’s wife, says ‘I am the REAL dictator’

    By | The Envoy – Mon, Mar 19, 2012

    Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife, Asma, in Paris 2010. (Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images)

    More fodder from the leaked cache of Bashar al-Assad emails: Asma al-Assad, the Syrian leader's British-born wife, declared to a friend that she was the "real dictator" of the two.

    [Related: Emails a glimpse into inner circle]

    "I am the REAL dictator, he has no choice," Asma wrote, according to excerpts of the emails published by London's Telegraph newspaper on Saturday.

    In others, she joked about the Syrian people at the center of the 2011 uprising, before the Syrian government's bloody crackdown left thousands dead.

    [Related: Majority of Americans against Syria intervention]

    The Telegraph also published a photo apparently forwarded to Bashar al-Assad showing a scantily-clad woman. But according to Reuters, one of the news organizations that received the trove of emails uncovered by his opposition, "There is little that seems overtly sexual in the content" and it does not appear Assad responded to it.

    As was the case with the excerpts first published by London's Guardian last week, the emails suggest that the Assads live in a surreal psychological bubble, insulated from the grotesque violence that has claimed the lives of 8,000 Syrians. The emails portray a dictator both sentimental and sinister.

     

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