Chloe Hadjimatheou
speaker
3,299 appearances
16 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 27 Aug
Chloe Hadjimatheou’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Thanks for listening to We Call Her Emma.
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You can also access exclusive reporting, including photos and videos from our time in Syria, on our website, observer.co.uk.
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Since the start of the war in 2011, Asma had largely been silent and hadn't been seen much in public.
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But in March 2012, information began leaking about what she'd been up to.
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According to the Syrian opposition, a mole in the president's inner circle had handed the personal passwords for Bashar al-Assad's emails to a cell of opposition activists, and for months they'd been monitoring their messages.
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the emails revealed a lot.
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While bombs were killing civilians across the country, Asma had been indulging in one of her favorite pastimes.
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More than 50 emails she sent and received were about shopping.
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The sanctions placed on Syria meant she couldn't make international purchases herself.
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So she was asking her friends abroad to help her buy, among other things, a fondue set, thousands of pounds worth of furniture, including a chandelier and a Ming vase, and handmade jewellery from a Paris workshop.
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I remember reading those emails at the time, and it felt like a Marie Antoinette moment.
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At this point in the war, Syrians were becoming citizen journalists and telling the world what was happening in their neighbourhoods.
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But the thing is, for most of the war, central Damascus where Asma lived would have seemed a world away from the rest of the country.
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Apart from a few bombings of government offices and the odd mortar shell in the first couple of years, life in the heart of the capital, at least for many of Syria's regime elites, went on pretty much as normal.
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People still went to dinner parties and concerts.
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Ladies had their hair and nails done.
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You could hear the war going on in the suburbs nearby.
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Occasionally, you could even smell the explosions.
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But actually, most of the time, you could kind of shut it out.
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Showing 821–840 of 3,299 · page 42 of 165
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