By ROBERT MACKEY
President Bashar al-Assad and his wife, Asma, appeared on Syrian state television last month, casting their ballots in a referendum on long-promised “reforms.”
[youtube http://youtu.be/QW2SKDzWtqk?]

Updated | 5:43 p.m. As Syrians mark the first anniversary of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday — with government-orchestrated rallies of support broadcast live on state television and furtive messages promising continued defiance posted on YouTube — exiles trying to make sense of the conflict from afar have been eagerly reading a cache of e-mails, said to be the private correspondence of the regime’s first couple, provided to The Guardian by opposition activists.

While The Guardian remains open to the possibility that some of the e-mails intercepted by the activists are fake, Britain’s former ambassador to Syria confirmed that two messages from him were genuine. The newspaper adds: “The cache of 3,000 e-mails passed on by a source in the Syrian opposition reveals a wealth of private information — including family photographs and videos, a scan of the president’s identity card and a birth certificate belonging to a family member — that would be difficult for even the best resourced hoaxer or intelligence agency to gather or fabricate.”

If the e-mails are genuine, there are potentially serious revelations in the trove, including what appears to be evidence that the president took advice from Iran on how to handle the crackdown on dissent. Even so, activists, bloggers and journalists scouring the messages published by The Guardian so far have largely focused on the trivial nature of the messages — the links tofunny YouTube clips, the songs purchased from iTunes — which seem to reveal that, even in the middle of a bloody campaign to crush a protest movement, the president and his wife are still, at heart, a British-educated doctor who was never supposed to lead his country, and the British-born former investment banker he married.

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