In January 2012, as Syria burned, Asma al-Assad e-mailed her dictator husband, Bashar, about ordering a fondue set from Amazon. “Pls can we get one?” she asked.
“Sure”, he replied. “By the way harrods [sic] sent a few days ago, all done.”
The “banality of evil” is an overworked phrase but one that fits the Assads like a Christian Louboutin shoe. In between their online shopping, Assad was using chemical weapons against his own people and having dissidents tortured to death in a prison designed for the sole purpose of surveillance, terror and death.
Back to the fondue, a running gag when Astérix the Gaul travels to Switzerland, circa 50BC. In one scene, as Swiss rebels prepare to do battle with a Roman legion, one of the fighters hurriedly puts a cooking pot of cheese on the campfire, and says: “There’ll be just enough time to melt the cheese before the Romans arrive.”
Did the Assads manage to squeeze in one last fondue before their Romans — the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — liberated Damascus from the couple’s three-decade tyranny? Perhaps the fondue set travelled with them to Moscow where their patron, Vlad the Bad, may or may not be tempted for a cheesy night with the couple, given the stink of humiliation that wafts from the Kremlin. All that money spent, all that advice, all those bombs — and all it bought is a tasteless Syrian refugee couple squatting on Russian soil.
These are heady but dangerous days for Syria and the region. Russia’s trying to cut a deal to save its naval bases. The West is scrambling to make friends with the rebels, uncertain if another Libya or Iraq lurks in the shadows. Türkiye and Israel have sent tanks. And in between are a whole bunch of rebel groups whose acronyms the world is just getting to know.
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