This content was streamed live to mobile devices during Channel 4's Dispatches programme on Mon 4 June, 2012.
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Foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Miller shows how Syrias first couple President Bashar al-Assad and his wife. Asma duped the West into believing they were true modernisers. He contrasts this with the al-Assad regimes brutal crackdown on the Syrian uprising and its widespread human rights abuses.
Bashar al-Assad has surrounded himself with a close network of family members and key allies.