A Kremlin spokesman said that the British-born wife of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is not seeking a divorce.
Reports in the Turkish media indicated that Asma al-Assad wants to end her marriage and leave Russia, where she and her husband obtained asylum after the rebel coalition overthrew the former president’s regime and took control of Damascus.
Asked about these reports in a telephone press conference, Dmitry Peskov said: “No, they do not correspond to reality.”
He also denied reports that Assad is being held in Moscow and that his real estate assets have been frozen.
Russia was a strong ally of the Assad regime and provided it military support during the civil war.
But reports in Turkish media on Sunday indicated that the Assad family was living under severe restrictions in the Russian capital, and that the former Syrian first lady had filed for divorce and wanted to return to London.
Mrs. Al-Assad holds both Syrian and British citizenship, but the British Foreign Secretary said earlier that he would not allow her to return to Britain.
Speaking in Parliament earlier this month, David Lammy said: “I want to make sure she is a sanctioned individual and is not welcome here in the UK.”
He added that he would do “everything in my power” to ensure that no member of the Assad family “gets a place in the UK.”
In a statement attributed to Bashar al-Assad last week, he said that he never intended to flee Syria, but he did It was airlifted from a Russian military base at Moscow’s request.
Asma al-Assad, 49, was born in the UK to Syrian parents in 1975 and grew up in Acton, west London.
She moved to Syria in 2000 at the age of 25 and married her husband just months after he succeeded his father as president.
Throughout her 24 years as Syria’s first lady, Mrs. Assad was a subject of curiosity in the Western media.
A controversial 2011 profile in Vogue described her as a “rose in the desert” and described her as “the freshest, sexiest First Lady.” The article has since been removed from Vogue’s website.
Just a month later, Mrs. Assad was criticized for remaining silent while her husband violently suppressed pro-democracy activists at the beginning of the Syrian civil war.
The conflict continued to claim the lives of about half a million people, and her husband was accused of using chemical weapons against civilians.
In 2016, Ms. Assad told Russian state-backed television that she had rejected a deal to provide her safe passage out of the war-torn country. In order to stand by her husband.
She announced that she was Treated for breast cancer in 2018 and said she fully recovered after one year.
President Assad’s office announced at the time that she had been diagnosed with leukemia and had begun treatment for the disease in May of this year.
A statement said that she would “temporarily withdraw” from public engagements.
