Dear Everyone,

This is the last post of 2024.

I was in the UK this past week with family and friends – and there’s plenty to report.

First, before flying to London, I wrote a deep-dive here about Syria’s former First Lady Asma al-Assad based on an interview with her cousin Abdu al-Dabbagh, whose arrest is also sought in Syria. No coincidence, surely, that various news stories then popped up in England’s Daily Telegraph, quoting anonymous sources saying that Mrs Assad’s leukemia has worsened and she wants to leave Moscow and return to her native country, the UK. Some reports in the Middle East even had her filing for divorce from her husband.

According to al-Dabbagh, whose mother, Saadat, talks to her sister, Sahar, Asma’s mother who is with her in Moscow, it’s all garbage. Propaganda most likely.

1. She isn’t at death’s door. She is in remission. There was a time when her health was so vulnerable that everyone, including her husband, wore Hazmat uniforms so as not to pass on any germs but, as I reported last week, she received a bone-marrow transplant from her son, Hafez in August, and so she is no longer in isolation. She hasn’t been in months. She’s getting better.

2. She isn’t getting divorced. She’s a conservative muslim.

3. She may want to return to England – but Tant Pis, as the French would say. On this, I’m with the British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (alongside whom I used to work at the Independent newspaper in the early 1990s). Yvette has rightly said there are other things to consider besides Mrs Bashad’s health. War crimes, for instance.

I got a small shock when I read that Indian-American venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan had been appointed as Trump’s advisor on AI policies and that Steve Bannon and the MAGA wing of the Republican party had gone berserk because Sriram, supports H1-B visas (for exceptional immigrants).

In one of life’s weird coincidences, I know Sriram Khrishnan.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates