In 2011, a group of teenage boys spray-painted a warning on to a wall in their school playground: “It’s your turn, Doctor.” The graffiti was a thinly veiled threat that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, a London-trained ophthalmologist, would be next in the line of Arab dictators toppled by the then raging Arab spring.

Axar.az informs, citing Guardian, it took 14 years, during which 620,000 were killed and nearly 14 million displaced, but eventually the doctor’s turn came and Assad was deposed, fleeing to Moscow in the middle of the night.

But after relinquishing his dictatorship for a gilded exile in Moscow, Assad is reportedly giving his medical training another go. The leader of the Middle East’s last Ba’athist regime now sits in the classroom, taking ophthalmology lessons, according to a well-placed source.

“He’s studying Russian and brushing up on his ophthalmology again,” said a friend of the Assad family who has kept in touch with them. “It’s a passion of his, he obviously doesn’t need the money. Even before the war in Syria began, he used to regularly practice his ophthalmology in Damascus,” they continued, suggesting the wealthy elite in Moscow could be his target clientele.

A year after his regime was toppled in Syria, the Assad family are living an isolated, quiet life of luxury in Moscow and the UAE. A friend of the family, sources in Russia and Syria, as well as leaked data, helped give rare insight into the lives of the now reclusive family who once ruled over Syria with an iron fist.

The family are likely to reside in the prestigious Rublyovka, a gated community of Moscow’s elite, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation. There they would rub shoulders with the likes of the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled Kyiv in 2014 and is believed to live in the area.