Assad’s wife faces EU travel ban

BELGIUM: President Bashar al-Assad’s wife Asma, a Western-educated former banker and style icon, faces an EU travel ban and asset freeze along with other members of Assad’s family, diplomats said Thursday. Asma al-Assad is on a list of 12 Syrians, including a handful of the president’s relatives, to be put to European Union foreign ministers Friday for a decision to bar them from travel and freeze their accounts across the 27-nation bloc.

The ministers, who in 12 previous rounds of sanctions against the Assad regime have already blacklisted some 150 firms and people, will also decide whether to add two extra firms to the list.

Assad himself was targeted by EU restrictive measures as far back as May.

In the latest sanctions aimed at ending the regime’s relentless repression of dissent, the EU last month slapped a freeze on Syria’s central bank.

It also banned trade in gold and precious metals with Syria and cargo flights to the EU operated by Syrians.

The bloc has already imposed oil and arms embargoes against Syria in response to a crackdown that has left more than 9,000 people dead in a revolt against Assad that began as peaceful protests before rebels took up arms.

As a British-born and British-educated onetime banker, it was widely believed Asma al-Assad’s grounding in Western values would help give the regime a more human face and shatter the isolation of the secretive Assad family.

AFP