The world was once smitten with Asma al-Assad, but after a year of lethal violence the woman who married into Syria's powerful ruling family has become a hate figure for many.

The London-born first lady, once described as a "rose in the desert", is at the heart of the shadowy inner circle of president Bashar al-Assad.

A British-educated former investment banker, she cultivated the image of a glamorous yet serious-minded woman with strong Western-inspired values.

She was expected to humanise the increasingly secretive and isolated Assad family.

That image crumbled when her husband's regime responded to an anti-government rebellion with extreme violence a year ago.

Mr Assad says he is fighting an insurrection, involving foreign-backed "terrorists", and Ms Assad has clearly decided to stand by her man despite international revulsion at his actions.

With her penchant for crystal-encrusted Christian Louboutin shoes and Chanel dresses, Ms Assad is a puzzle for many.

The opposition roundly rejects suggestions she is effectively a prisoner of conscience in the presidential palace.

"She was very much, as we would say, left wing. She seemed to be very bright, very respectful of others," said Gaia Servadio, a writer and historian who has worked with Ms Assad.

"It's a very nasty regime ... thousands of people have been killed. So it's very difficult to say: poor woman. She certainly should have found a way to talk."

Syrians protest against the Assad regime in on Christmas Day, 2011 ( Reuters )

Before the uprising, the world was taken by Ms Assad's immaculate facade.

In Western media, the 36-year-old mother of three was described as sophisticated, elegant, confident, with a "killer IQ" and an interest in opening up Syria through art and charity.

For those who pinned their hopes on Mr Assad as a potential reformer, his photogenic wife bolstered that image, lending a touch of glamour to his awkward public appearances.

A glowing article in Vogue magazine described her as a "rose in the desert" and her household as "wildly democratic". The fashion bible has since removed the article from its website, but copy of the text has been reprinted on other sites.

French newspaper Paris Match, meanwhile, said she was an "element of light in a country full of shadow zones".

People were charmed by her classy demeanour, liberal views and British accent.

She received the Gold Medal of the Presidency of The Italian Republic for humanitarian work in 2008 and won an honorary archaeology doctorate from La Sapienza university in Rome.

'The real dictator'

Yet emails published by Britain's Guardian newspaper this month from accounts believed to belong to the family offer a different portrait.

They show her as a capricious dictator's wife spending tens of thousands of pounds on jewels, fancy furniture, and a Venetian glass vase from Harrods.

"I am the real dictator, he has no choice," she apparently said in one of the emails in a comment about her husband.

Ms Assad, the London-born daughter of a Sunni Muslim Syrian doctor, spent the first 25 years of her life in North Acton.

Known as Emma to her British friends, she was a rising star at JP Morgan when she met Bashar, who had studied ophthalmology in London but was sent home to be groomed for the presidency after his elder brother, Basil, died in a car crash in 1994.

They married in 2000. What followed was a life full of glamour.

They once dined with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in Syria. According to Vogue, Mr Assad joked: "Brad Pitt wanted to send his security guards here to come and get some training!"

The Assad side of the clan, however, reportedly did not take to Ms Assad, not least because of her Sunni Muslim origins.

Mr Assad was elected president with 97 per cent of the vote in 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria with an iron fist for decades.

LtoR Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez. ( Reuters )

Before the start of the 2011 uprising, there was hope Syria could change. Syrians saw his choice of wife as proof that things were about to change.

But those hopes faded as the revolt unfolded. As the death toll from the fighting grew, Ms Assad gradually disappeared from public view.

She broke her silence in February, saying in a statement: "The president is the president of Syria, not a faction of Syrians, and the first lady supports him in that role."

In a haunting interview with CNN, looking nervous, she once said: "We are losing time. We are working against the clock."

"Three thousand and three hundred people injured. More than that, 22,000 people have been displaced from their homes ... this is the 21st century. Where in the world could this happen?" she said.

She was talking in 2009 about an Israeli operation in Gaza.

A Syrian dissident from Aleppo who lives in London, Zayed, says most Syrians in Britain now despise Ms Assad.

Zayed, angrily comparing Ms Assad to Marie Antoinette or the wife of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, called on the Syrian leader's wife to "make a stand for your own sake, for your own people".

"She never did," he said.

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Some believe she is a propaganda tool of the Assad family, a liberal going through a moral crisis in Damascus, unable to speak up or escape.

"She is virtually a prisoner. The two of them missed their boat," Ms Servadio said.

"I would certainly accuse him (Assad) of being a coward. ... I think he is a puppet, very much used.

"For them (the family) it's wonderful to have a scapegoat, these two people at the top who are absorbing all the hatred."

But Ghassan Ibrahim, Global Arab Network's London-based editor, disagrees.

"It's not true at all. Assad has been in power for over 12 years. He is in full control. Giving such excuses to him is unacceptable. They are like the Mafia," he said.

For ordinary Syrians, Ms Assad is now a hate figure.

"They have stolen Syrian money. She is squandering it here in London," said Fawaz, a man who came to an opposition fund-raising event in London wrapped in a Syrian flag.

"She and her father are accomplices to this crime. They learned nothing from the democracy here in the UK."

ABC/Reuters