How Assad's civil war is aflame in the heart of British suburbia

At first glance, it seems to be no more than a nondescript suburban street of neat 1930s semis, too close to the noisy A40 dual carriageway to be fashionable. 

But this road in the West London suburb of Acton has become the capital’s unlikely front line in Syria’s increasingly bloody and chaotic civil war.

The Syrian battle of Acton is fought not with Kalashnikovs, artillery and car bombs, but with snubs, insults and severed relations.

It is a fight taken up by a once close-knit Syrian diaspora incensed by the sight of President Bashar Assad’s in-laws enjoying apparently comfortable and privileged lives here – while his regime massacres thousands in Syria and millions have lost their homes, and many more live in fear.

It is further inflamed by revelations that Dr Fawaz Akhras, father of Assad’s wife Asma, has secretly advised his brutal son-in-law on ways to manipulate the Western media. Few in the local Syrian community dare to confront Mr Akhras and his wife Sahar Otri for fear of reprisals against their relatives back home. For the same reason, most declined to give their real names for this article.

But demonstrations have been held outside the Akhrases’ home –  a well-cared-for, four-bed semi, where the only obvious signs of Middle East influence are palm trees in the garden and a giant  satellite dish to pick up Arabic television. The couple have had their garden wall toppled, double-glazed windows broken and the front of their home paint-bombed.

A large white banner was draped across the house proclaiming, ‘Out Damned Spot’, and declaring that ‘all the perfumes in Arabia’ would not remove the stench of the regime. Sahar has been abused in the street, with rebel slogans shouted at her. And most local Syrians treat the couple like pariahs. ‘When I see them, I turn my face,’ says a neighbour who once considered them friends.

‘People feel contempt for them,’ adds Malik al-Abdeh, an opposition journalist whose parents live right opposite the Akhrases.

‘People feel morally superior to them because they have sacrificed family members and their towns and homes have been destroyed. They appear to be very callous, selfish, money-grabbing and tainted by association with  the regime.’

Many in the local Syrian diaspora have been shown copies of a photograph, a timeless family scene of three generations gathered for a child’s birthday party and posing behind a table laden with food.

But this image of President Assad’s wife Asma celebrating in Damascus with her parents Fawaz and Sahar, has become an unlikely symbol of anger, hurt and grief 2,000 miles away in Acton. It is here that Asma – whose three children are also in the picture alongside the elder of her two brothers, Feras, and her two sisters-in-law, one holding a baby – grew up in a white pebble-dashed house identical to thousands of other homes built for First World War heroes in London’s outer sprawl.

The photo was taken as Syria was sliding into the abyss of war. As the formerly friendly and close-knit Syrian community fractured, it has been circulated as a bitter aide memoire of the once-respected, but now hated, family in their midst.

Mr Al-Abdeh’s mother is a distant cousin of Sahar’s but no longer sees her. ‘She’s disgusted by her and her position,’ he said.

Nowadays the blinds of the Akhrases’ home are permanently drawn and neighbours say discreet security cameras have been installed. The police have been called during the worst demonstrations and neighbours claim that private security guards have been seen outside standing watch.

The couple seldom answer the door, and often come and go through the back entrance. During Ramadan last summer, Sahar did not go to the mosque at the nearby King Fahad Academy as she usually does.

‘People would spit on her face – if they didn’t attack her,’ a local Muslim said. ‘Everyone is disgusted,’ says a Syrian neighbour of the Akhrases. ‘I hope the day will come when they see their daughter and her family killed or exiled.

‘I hope one day they taste what thousands of Syrian parents are suffering.’

Mariam, a 30-year-old college lecturer, recounted the horrific nature of that suffering with barely suppressed fury. She told how she, her husband and their two children escaped from a rebel-held area of the city of Homs two years ago. For weeks they huddled inside their apartment while shells exploded all around.

In another part of the city, Mariam’s father, who had a heart problem, died after ten days without food or medicine. She had to bury him swiftly, without a proper ceremony, before regime forces targeted the funeral.

Days later, she and her traumatised family fled to Damascus, and then flew on to London where Mariam’s  sister lived. They had lost everything – their home, her husband’s fabric shop in the souk, the job she loved – but worse was to come.

On Facebook, she found gruesome pictures of a massacre in a house in Homs. The victims were 20 members of her aunt’s family. The dead included women, children, a man of 85 and a one-year-old baby. Their killers had daubed messages on the walls with their blood. ‘I couldn’t believe it. It was awful,’ Mariam recalls.

In contrast, Mr Akhras is still working as a cardiologist, driving to work in his BMW to his Harley Street clinic, or the private Cromwell Hospital in Kensington, West London.

Mohammed, another Acton neighbour, remembers him as a ‘decent man’ with whom he would sometimes chat in the street. Sahar was a first secretary at the Syrian embassy, raised money for Syrian charities and liked to take strolls in the London neighbourhood they moved to in search of a better life.

Huda, another neighbour, described Asma as ‘very nice girl, very normal and friendly’. She went to a private school in Marylebone, Central London, and on to King’s College London, before becoming an investment banker. Then, in 2000, she married Assad. Nobody in the neighbourhood knew until after the event. ‘We were shocked,’ Huda says. ‘People didn’t say anything. They didn’t congratulate them. How could a Sunni family let their daughter marry an Alawi, especially him?’

Thereafter the Akhrases grew increasingly aloof, neighbours say. Few local people were invited into their house, even for coffee. A Syrian embassy Mercedes would arrive to pick up Sahar. She acquired an Indonesian maid – presumably through the embassy. Her husband founded the British-Syrian Society to promote better relations between the two countries, and consorted with MPs, peers, ambassadors and businessmen. Six months before the start of the uprising, the Queen invited them to a state banquet at Windsor Castle in honour of the Emir of Qatar.

But since the conflict began, wary suspicion has turned to hatred.

Almost every Syrian family in the neighbourhood has had relatives killed, imprisoned, tortured or forced into desperate refugee camps.

They have watched with fury as Assad’s regime has used chemical weapons, Scud missiles and barrel bombs against its own citizens, destroying whole towns and cities.

‘If I get a call from Syria during the day my heart goes through my feet because it means something awful has happened,’ Mohammed says with a shudder. A dozen members of his extended family have been killed, including a newly married cousin shot with his bride in their car. He was killed. She lost her legs.

Meanwhile the Akhrases’ Syrian neighbours parcel up second-hand clothes and blankets to send home  to help their destitute compatriots survive the winter. Then they see Sahar returning home with shopping bags from Harrods. One day shortly before Christmas she went out wearing a long fur coat.

They have watched Sahar take her grandchildren to the playground in the park. ‘She was playing with the kids when millions of children in Syria have had their lives taken away from them and cannot laugh any more,’ Huda complains bitterly.

They have watched Mr Akhras and his wife depart on regular visits to Damascus, knowing that they themselves would be swiftly arrested – or worse – if they tried to return home.

Before Christmas, the doctor’s younger brother Eyad arrived in Acton from Bahrain. As Syria’s death toll rose relentlessly, Eyad’s wife gave birth to her third child.

That Mr Akhras comes from Homs, the epicentre of the uprising, and is a Sunni like most of the rebels, only makes things worse. ‘Anger is too small a word. They’re going about their lives as if nothing at all is happening,’ said Khlood, a dignified and articulate woman whose cousin was recently sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for demonstrating, unarmed, against the regime in Daraa, a city in the south of Syria.

 Whether such vilification against the Akhrases is justified is debatable. Can they really be held responsible for the atrocities of their son-in-law? Their defenders say they are in an impossible position.

They are caught between family loyalty and international outrage. Were Mr Akhras to condemn the regime, his defenders point out, he would endanger his daughter and her three children.

But emails obtained by Syrian opposition activists in 2012 suggest he is hardly a neutral bystander in the conflict.

They suggest that he enjoys some influence with the Syrian despot – and that a man who has dedicated his career to saving lives privately supports a regime that is destroying them on an industrial scale.

In those emails he advised Assad on ways to counter Western media criticism of the regime’s barbarity. In one, he proposed that the regime dismiss a Channel 4 documentary entitled ‘Syria’s Torture Machine’ as British propaganda.

And in another he listed 13 ways of rebutting criticism of the regime. Those included highlighting US human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, the much higher death toll in Libya, the disorder engulfing other ‘Arab Spring’ countries, the suppression of the ‘Occupy’ protests in London and New York, and the brutality of Syria’s rebels.

Other emails included a suggestion that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad was behind the attacks of 9/11, and mockery of Britain – a country whose rights and freedoms Mr Akhras has enjoyed since emigrating here in 1973.

In 2012 I called him after the  massacre of 108 civilians, mostly women and children, in the village of Houla – but he refused to comment. When I protested that it  was an important issue, he replied:  ‘It’s an important issue to you.'

In one of his very few public utterances since the conflict started, Mr Akhras preposterously compared the regime’s brutal crackdown on the rebels to the British Government’s handling of the London riots of 2011. No matter that the police killed not a single rioter. ‘When the London riots broke out and David Cameron said he would get the army out, now would you compare that to Homs?’ he said.

Neighbours claim that, in private conversations, he and his wife have backed the regime. Mr Akhras allegedly told one – well before the protests turned violent in 2011 – that the demonstrators were armed religious extremists. Sahar told another that the Syrian people deserved what was happening to them because they had not listened to their government.

Neighbours also complain that at no point have the Akhrases displayed a shred of compassion for the suffering of them, their relatives, or their compatriots. Had they felt any sympathy, said Khlood, ‘they would have shown it in one way or another. They would have signalled it somehow’.

Malik al-Abdeh, the opposition journalist, does not regard the Akhrases as evil, but he does contend that they made ‘a pact with the devil’ when their daughter married Assad. ‘They were buying a stake in the regime. They were able to make a lot of money and now, obviously, they are paying the price,’ he said.

That price is a wintry chill in Acton’s Syrian front line.

Source: Dailymail By MARTIN FLETCHER