DAMASCUS, Syria – Syrian President Bashar Assad and his wife have tested positive for the coronavirus, the president’s office said Monday, with both showing only mild symptoms of the disease.
In a statement, Assad’s office said the first pair performed PCR tests after experiencing mild symptoms consistent with COVID-19 disease. It said Assad, 55, and his wife Asma, who is 10 years younger and announced her recovery from breast cancer in 2019, will continue to work from home, where they will be isolated for between two and three weeks.
Both were in “good health and stable condition,” it added.
Syria, which marks 10 years of war next week, has recorded nearly 16,000 virus cases in government-run parts of the country, including 1,063 deaths. But the numbers are believed to be much higher with limited amounts of PCR testing being done, particularly in areas of northern Syria that are outside of government control.
The pandemic, which has hit even developed countries hard, has posed a major challenge to Syrian healthcare, which has already been exhausted from years of conflict.
Syria started a vaccination campaign last week amid an increasing number of contamination cases, but no details of the trial have been given, nor are local journalists allowed to witness the rollout. The health minister said the government had bought the vaccines in a friendly country he did not want to name.
The announcement came days after international and Israeli media reports revealed that Israel paid Russia $ 1.2 million to supply the Syrian government with coronavirus vaccines. It was reportedly part of a deal that secured the release of an Israeli woman in Damascus. The terms of the clandestine tradeoff negotiated by Moscow remained unclear. Damascus denied it had happened and Russia had no comment.
Israeli funding of Syria’s vaccination efforts would be an embarrassment to Assad’s government, which sees Israel as its main regional enemy.
It was not immediately clear whether Assad, who has been in power since his late father’s takeover in 2000, or any of his family members has been vaccinated.
Syria has been in civil war for the past 10 years since anti-government protests that began as part of the Arab Spring uprisings turned into an uprising in response to military action. A decade of fighting has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and millions of displaced people.