The british aristocrat Randle Siddeley was in Syria, helping Assads wife with some gardening, apparently. This from WikiLeaks, 3 days before the outbreak of war:

'I sent Zyad an email yesterday asking whether he had managed to get all the wet weather gear for the team as it is urgently needed with all the horrible weather'

'wet' is a well known code for violence/assassination in spy-land. His company seems to check out, but LinkedIn is strange, his employees seem to only have worked for him, and his company only has one single recommendation. I looked up Syrias Meteorological data and while these emails were not sent in the dry season, neither were they in the middle of the wet season. https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2094589_re-wet-weather-protection.html

Anons/Q- is this line of enquiry worth developing?