Message-ID: 19deabfadcedb6aa From: Bourgeois Olivier To: Maroun NAJM , Reme Sakr Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 00:11:36 +0200 Subject: 26.04.2026 - FK - Pre-discovery Good evening, Below you will find a summary of my notes for the session of April 26th. There may be a few lingering errors or inaccuracies. I hope to send you the rest in the coming days. Reme, if you have any additional information, please don't hesitate; any details will be helpful at this stage. Maroun; please send us your feedback on this, it will help us for what will come next. Thank you in advance. Cheers Olivier *AAA* *26/04/2026* *Direction : * *She was dreaming of transforming the system but the system transformed her. * *THE FIRST MEETING 31/12/2005 * *Fares remind us the context : * "The hopes were high among Syrians and the eagerness to push the new president, a younger president, he had absolutely everyone backing him up." We are in 2005, Fares did work on a first project for the First Lady in 2004, without being an employee, with a complete free space (no specific instruction). The project was successful. Then Fares left to study in the UK for a few months and came back to Syria in June 2005, resumed his work at MTN. Between June and December, he remembers that there hadn't been many activities, just a few meetings with British consultants on communication strategy issues. It must be said that after the major shock of the assassination of Lebanese President Rafic Hariri and the withdrawal of the Syrian army from Lebanon, calm prevailed. *On Thursday, December 29, 2005,* Fares was at home in his apartment, where he lived with his mother, his wife, and his daughter. He received an unexpected call from the house management of the First Lady. The person says: "We will send You a car on *Saturday morning at 8am* ". This visit is not subject to any protocol, to any record, to any schedule. It's a personal and private visit. At that moment, Fares knew nothing about the purpose of the meeting, except for its duration: 45 minutes. This made him quite nervous and even prevented him from sleeping for the two nights preceding the meeting. Fares: "I didn't know what they wanted from me; it was a one-on-one meeting with the First Lady, so I had to be prepared. But I didn't know what to expect, how to dress, how to behave, whether I should bring my mobile phone or not. I hadn't been given any instructions. I didn't sleep a wink for 48 hours, until I was fully dressed at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday. And then I started waiting… Then I received a call from their "House", in order to give them the directions of where I lived. I remember waiting on the balcony with my mother and my wife. And at 7:45 am, a huge blue Mercedes, a Class 300 (which the Syrians called the "Ghost"), appeared at the bottom of my building. There were 2 people in the car, one of them called me on my mobile and said : "when it's time, we will confirm to you so you can join us". He calls back, 15 minutes before 8am, and I go downstairs with my notebook and my graduation thesis, nothing else." I asked Fares if he had imagined the worst, like paying a little visit to his aunt. He confirmed, he had thought about it. Fares : "After five minutes of driving, the man in the passenger seat received a call. He was told the meeting would be delayed, and we pulled over. That's when conspiracy theories started to take root in my mind. Why does it happen? What's happening? Are we waiting for another car to kidnap me? I was scared to shit. A deathly silence reigned in the car... And I have nothing to do, no phone, nothing...So I wait. Then a new call came and we started to move. We take the road to the mountain, I remember this used to be a no go zone when I was a kid. But still, I don't know where we are going, the Palace ? Her House ?... After 10 minutes we reached a road I have never been before, till we reached a second hill and suddenly the driver took a right turn and a small fence. There are security people, they look at the driver. They open the gate. We drove in, there were many nice trees and then a small house. The car stops, the officer in the passenger seat goes out and tries to open the door for me but I open the door myself. I walked up 3 steps, the door opened and she was there waiting for me". AAA : " How are You ? Sorry we're late. We just came from a meeting." Fares (a little surprised) : "So when did you start ? " AAA : "Today i started at 6am" Then AAA and Fares went to a small office, leather sofas, a desk, a computer on the desk and a lot of papers. AAA offers Fares a seat and asks him about his mother (Fares' mother had a treatment for cancer), then about his wife and daughter (Fares married Rasha in January 2005 and Aya was born later in the year) and about his experience in London. Fares responded with short sentences, but she continued to ask him questions about himself and his family. AAA : " What's your mother's situation ? What did the doctor say ? Do you need any help? Who are you taking her to? What's the name of her doctor? Does Aya keep you awake?" Then she started to talk about her own children. AAA : "what does Rasha think about what we do? About your work with us?" (Fares mentions that Rasha was opposed to Fares working with them. And apparently, AAA knew about it. How? Fares and Rasha had had dinner some time before with "their" secretary, Lena, and her brother. The presidency had been discussed, and Rasha had expressed her disapproval of Fares working with them. They were happy with the private sector, etc ...) That's when the conversation takes a more professional turn. AAA : "how did you find the performance of our protocol team, our press team, during the event ?" (event = "Follow the Women") Fares did not answer in a negative way, he did not have any negative impression. AAA : "Did you have any involvement with the public sector?" Fares : "no, and I don't like to work with the public sector" AAA : "yes, I understand why because public sector cannot do what you've done" Then they started to talk about the project "woman for peace", a kind of debriefing (AAA keeps on asking very precise questions to Fares) And this is when they entered the discussion "Think out of the box / Prototypes". AAA told Fares that it was very difficult for her to find a good communication agency that could improve the image of the country abroad (at that time she was already working with Bell Pottinger among other agencies, but not really happy with them). Projects like "Follow the Women" help to strengthen Syria's message of peace. She explained what they are trying to do with the Syria Trust for development. (reminder : when this first meeting between AAA and Fares happens Syria is boycotted or under international sanctions). AAA says that she did not elaborate on Syria's image abroad or how they could handle it. She is looking for ways and for ideas or initiatives similar to "Follow the Women" to enhance and project the real image of Syria. Then she started to talk about FIRDOS (Fund for the integrated Rural Development of Syria = later transformed into the Syria Trust), one of her first initiatives. All this started when she married the president. Officially, as the president's wife, she did not have any mandate, but she wanted one. So just after she got married, she started to visit the rural and remote areas intensively. She then discovered the heart of Syria on her own, without any media, to educate herself about Syrian society (she was not a well-known public figure to Syrians at the time, and they did not recognize her when they met her. So she pretended to be an official from the Ministry of Agriculture, she was accompanied by Awatef Shoura). This one year incognito Tour around Syria gave her the opportunity to see the reality on the ground, the real lives of people in rural areas, their problems, their needs, the communities, etc...From this experience came the idea of creating a Syrian-style Grameen Bank, based on the same model as that developed by Yunus. She concluded by saying how important it is to join efforts to break the prototype. She is aware it will be difficult to change. They will face many obstacles, resistance and challenges, particularly from the government sector (hence her idea of introducing the middle class private sector into the play, people like Fares). She talks also about initiatives she was working on : the disability program project, the social development project and the image of Syria project (truth that she and her husband had already decided since 2001 that she would be in charge the image of the country abroad, but it did not mean that she would be the image of the country at the time.) Fares hands her his thesis, explaining why he is giving it to her: "That's how I perceived the image of the country and understood the failure of communications." (A thesis highly critical of the Ba'ath Party) (Following Hariri's assassination, the handling of the situation was disastrous and the repercussions on the country's image catastrophic. Ultimately, this old guard, or these old guns, were blamed but never truly punished. At the time, the president didn't dare force them out for fear of an internal uprising. This is one of the major mistakes that the president would pay for a few years later.) Note : Reme questions whether these sacrificial lambs represented by the old guard were very convenient for the presidency; if anyone was to blame...it was the government. Convenient for the presidency… a strategy? At the time, it became clear that there were divisions between the presidency and the government. The presidency wanted to preserve its image at all costs... at the expense of the government. So, what were the Syrians saying? "He's good, he's a good president, but the people around him are bad." The meeting, which was supposed to last 45 minutes, ended up lasting two hours. From that point on, AAA and Fares began meeting regularly to discuss various projects, until Fares joined the Private Office in 2007. I asked Fares what his first impression was about this meeting, about her, etc ... Fares : "It was amazing. I met with someone who's really eager to change. Someone who's really honest about things. Someone honest about what she does and explain why. For example, she came to the meet and greet with the Women for Peace and she was pregnant, that's why she couldn't ride her bike. But she said, "Next time, I'll ride it." And she did. She did ride her bike after all. I saw her as a person with a vision, a person who understands the challenges, who wants the best for the country. I thought : this was such a positive meeting and positive discussion. Very transparent, very open, very honest, very welcoming. I felt like I was sitting with someone you knew forever. So yes, it was a beautiful, comforting meeting." *ADDITIONAL NOTES FROM THE 26th of April * *RM * Rami Makhlouf went on The Wall Street Journal. He did an interview with this Journal. Part of the interview was about the uprises. Fares heard from AAA that he never consulted anyone. He never asked anyone. In 2010, RM began using his financial power to build something different. He created an independent military force and a political party (Syrian Social Nationalist Party ?). RM, through this means, wanted to position himself as an alternative. When this article was published in december 2010 (date to check), Fares remembered, they were coming back from Paris : "an article out of nowhere talking about the Arab Spring, the uprise (in dec 2010 ?) and what could happen in Syria". AAA was very upset by this article : "He didn't ask anyone. He doesn't know what he's doing. It is stupid." In 2020, RM will fall from grace. Officially the decision comes from BAA, but according to Fares testimony AAA influence on this decision is "100%" *MINISTERS* Note: The influence she has on him has evolved over time. The more external visibility she gains, the more her power grows, the more influence she has. She develops more concrete projects on the ground, which gives her more references and therefore more power, even over him. And at that point, she was handling the management, the operational management: the media office of the presidency, protocol, events, visits, etc everything in the sphere of the presidency, she would also speak to the ministers directly but not all of them (mainly Education, Health, Social Affairs, Culture, etc ...). It seems that sometimes a dispute could even break out with a minister, leading to a total disagreement; ultimately, the minister was replaced. *BAA supposed extramarital affairs* Luna Chebel, Sheherazad Jaafari, Hadeel Al-Ali. These names appeared during a leak of 3000 emails from the presidency in March 2012. The AAA never spoke about it from a personal point of view (never spoke about the rumors) but could speak about it from a strictly professional point of view. According to Fares, these were not rumors. If the rumors affected her, no one knows, because she never showed it. Were there any rumors about her? Fares: "Never, no one would have dared." *THE MOTHER IN LAW : Anissa & Family* Contrary to rumors, she was very close to her mother-in-law. Fares : "she needed her mother in law. What for? For all the blessings she will get from the whole Alawite community." Fares doesn't know who orchestrated these rumors but this was intentional to damage her relationship with the Alawite community. He believes the Alawite community never really accepted her and accused her ("from day one") of all the bad things happening to the coastal area. She didn't have a bad relationship with BAA's brothers. The same couldn't be said for BAA's sister and some of his sisters-in-law. *THE CHINESE VISIT 2023 (last official trip outside of the country ?)* It's an official visit. Their children are accompanying them. The teams of the private office constantly asked themselves the following question: how to create a positive impact from her person. Show her as a visionary person, nice, positive, humble, etc... From this perspective, the trip to China was a success. But it was never possible to replicate it on a larger scale because the communication vehicle of the presidency and in the country was damaged. Fares did not participate in the trip, but he was involved in its preparation. By meeting with the Chinese ambassador to Syria. The idea behind this visit to the ambassador was to create specific joint programs. They also discuss the American sanctions. There's also the magazine episode : the ambassador showed Fares dozens of magazine articles that covered the presidential visit, the atmosphere, the success, and the Chinese public's perception of the First Lady. These magazines sometimes appeared six or seven months after the visit. The bodyguard woman of the First Lady created a buzz (unclear to me why) Reme discussed the First Lady's clothing choices for this visit to China, choices that were thoughtful and very elaborate. Reme also mentioned her visit to a university to speak to students of Arabic language where she spoke about "family values and conservative values". According to Reme, The First Lady's mission was clearly to strengthen cultural ties between Syria and the entire trip was orchestrated to reflect this cultural conservative family values...This was made all the easier because her children were with her, she was therefore everything at once: the mother, the pretty woman, the cultured and intelligent woman, etc. *MAYASSA AL-THANI* Following a number of official visits, they grew closer to each other. They remained in constant contact and met privately outside the official visits. Nature of the relationship : Friends. Contrary to what the 2012 leaks suggested, their relationship did not end in 2012, when Mayssa suggested she leave the country, but in 2014. After the leak, they continued to talk through other communication channels... but eventually lost touch in 2014. AAA wanted to keep and protect that relationship, keep it out of politics, but she couldn't because of the other side (political issues). *THE UPRISE* After the uprising, they realized that they needed to close the gap between them and the people, and suddenly the private office started organizing meetings with different groups of people (not related to banking sector, social development or disability ... as before), some of them are in opposition. Fares was not really involved in the part, he was busy with the trust at that time. The idea of these meetings was to try to understand the causes. They were against use of force. Then the whole scene changed into something that was out of our control. I raise the question with Fares: "In your opinion, who was in charge when the uprising started?" Fares : "No one was in charge". According to Fares, there is clearly a problem with overall management (across the country, in all sectors, among individuals in positions of authority), and this problem has been identified for a long time. There are also very serious communication problems. Many people in positions of responsibility were resistant to change. Fares : "Management was a key deficiency in the country. We do have institutions, but we never worked on developing the right people to manage these institutions. We never realized the corruption that the Baas party has implanted in the system, in the educational system, in the universities, in the scholarships that the countries have funded. BAA never saw that coming, he admitted it saying : we invested in institutions, we invested in building institutions, but we did not invest in the people running these institutions." (First one-on-one meeting of Fares with the president in 2014.) I asked : "Why not just fire all the people hostile to change? Those who resisted? The old guard? They had 10 years to do it ... " Fares : "Between 2001 and 2010, the private banking sector was booming, Telecom sector was booming, tourism was booming ... A middle class is emerging, many people come from the countryside to work in Damascus or Aleppo. But the direct impact of this boom in terms of economy, education, etc... is limited to the people of Damascus & Aleppo, the direct impact is not visible in rural areas. There is an indirect impact because people who come to work in the city support their families who remain in the villages. But they never built anything to improve the local economy or health services, etc in their villages... And then the gap between the rural areas and the city was getting bigger " *AAA THE PRIVATE OFFICE * When started the private office in 2001, she handpicked her team based on specific criteria. There has been an evolution in recruitment and in the people recruited. *NOTE : *When Fares joined the private office in 2007, he was 34 years old, AAA was 32 ans BAA was 42. *THE SHIFT OF 2009 : * That year witnessed an intensive international tours Europe, South America, etc...The Louvre project, etc This Tour was the return of Syria on the international scene. Why is this a shift ? Fares : " because it shifted the focus from internal challenges and issues" Simultaneously the international context, and particularly in certain countries of the region, is changing: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya,... Inside Syria, *OLIVE (messy) notes :* *Scene Number 1 * The first meeting one to one meeting = 31st of December 2005 (*as a second scene Fares would like to talk about "follow the women" bike ride for peace in 2006, we'll have to come back to this)* Note : that the office of the First Lady doesn't really exist because she was not the First Lady and it was not in the constitution. It was called the private office. By 2007, when Fares joined the private office, he had done 4 or 5 projects incognito for the presidency. *Fares : « she's telling you everything about what she dreams to change, * *So we really see someone who wants to change something »* Fares mentioned that he has been living the last 20 years in high alert mode, so it's not easy for him to talk about all this. *Fares mentioned the five years plan back in 2015, he and his team worked on the creation of a new strategy for the Syrian Trust organization, all went to the bin.* *The first Lady used to bring Fares and his team sandwiches when they were working on the weekends, and do the dishwashing with them in the office. * *He confirmed she was obsessed with the image, but didn't feel it in the very beginning. He started to feel it in 2008, during the Abu Dhabi visit. * In 2016 there's a kind of turning point. She becomes the first lady when Anissa passes away. 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