They ‘didn’t look the type’: how the media was fooled by Bashar and Asma al-Assad | Zoe Williams

Some journalists underestimated the threat of the brutal president, while his first lady was glamorised in a Vogue feature

As Bashar al-Assad is ousted as Syria's brutal president, his wife Asma and children having fled to Russia shortly before, the scenes are too astonishing to settle. We can't call it a finished revolution, but we can call Assad's a finished regime and mark the end of the Syrian civil war: 13 years of heinous bloodshed; 580,000 people killed - more than 230,000 of them civilians, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which attributes about 90% of those non-combatant deaths to Assad's forces.

He never looked the type, foreign correspondents say. Adrian Blomfield in the Telegraph calls Assad awkward and gangly, his mannerisms unassuming". John Simpson found him meek and anxious to please". And who could forget how un-bloodthirsty, how incongruous, Asma al-Assad looked? Neat and understated, like a wife in a miniseries.