As soon as the leaked "Assad emails" began to appear last week, As'ad AbuKhalil (who blogs as The Angry Arab) announced, very confidently, that they were a hoax.

"It is so lacking in credibility," he wrote. "It took me minutes to reach my conclusion. Al-'Alam TV guy is giving advice to Asad directly to his email? ... And the notion that Asma' Al-Asad, knowing that eyes are all on her, resorts to order goods through the internet is not believable."

While leaks should always be viewed with a degree of scepticism, pending confirmation, dismissing them out of hand can be as foolish as blind credulity.

For example, the evidence of Asma's shopping activities revealed in the emails looks pretty solid. As the Guardian made clear at the outset, suppliers of the goods confirmed that the email exchanges were genuine.

As for al-Alam TV's man (Hussein Mortada), the emails do not suggest – as The Angry Arab claims – that he was advising President Assad directly. They were addressed to one of Assad's media advisers, Hadeel al-Ali. Ali then forwarded one of them to the president, asking him to read it because it "represents a lot of people's opinions". Mortada, incidentally, had been approached by the Guardian for confirmation before the emails were published but failed to return calls – so he's not rushing to deny that he sent them.

In his latest blog post on the subject, The Angry Arab claims that the email address identified as that of President Assad (sam@alshahba.com) actually belonged to someone else. For supporting evidence, he has been studying an email about Syria's relations with Turkey and concludes "from the phraseology and the manner of address" that it cannot have been sent by Bashar al-Assad.

Indeed, it cannot. The email contains a memo reporting key points from a meeting with the Turkish ambassador (it doesn't say who met him). The memo itself is addressed to presidential adviser Bouthaina Shaaban and its author is not identified. The header at the top of the email indicates that Shaaban then passed the memo without a covering note to sam@alshahba.com.

Poring over the text to demonstrate that the memo was not written by Assad is thus a pointless exercise, since there is no reason to suppose that he did write it.

But supposing for a moment that sam@alshahba.com was notBashar's personal email address, whose was it? Citing an opposition website, The Angry Arab claims that "Sam" is actuallyDr Sam Dallah, Dean of the Higher Institute of Business Administration in Syria. 

Apart from the firstname "Sam", is there any reason to think this might be true? Dr Dallah has played a fairly central role in Syria's so-called reform programme but even so, and looking at the host of emails so far released, it's hard to understand why so many officials and others would be bombarding him with information and advice. Why, for example, would Bouthaina Shaaban send him a memo about Syrian-Turkish relations? 

And why would Fawaz Akhras bother sending his suggestions for improving the regime's propaganda effort to Dr Dallah at the Higher Institute of Business Administration when his own son-in-law is the person running the country?

Similarly, if sam@alshahba.com is Dallah and not Assad, what are we to make of all those lovey-dovey emails from Asma? Are we to conclude that she was carrying on an affair with Dallah behind the president's back? 

The idea that "Sam" is really Dallah just doesn't make sense.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 20 March 2012