Assiri was born in 1980 in Abha, Asir Province, a region in south-west Saudi Arabia.
[2] Assiri described his human rights concerns starting with voicing the worries of his air force colleagues who felt that their salaries were unfairly low in comparison with the wealth of members of the Saudi royal family.
In 2006 he attended five or six public forums organised by Saud al-Hashimi in Jeddah, in which guests included the Palestinian Khaled Mashal and the Tunisian Rached Ghannouchi.
In 2014, worried by the arrests of Abdullah al-Hamid and Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association and the long prison sentences that they received and by news from his colleagues that he would most likely be imprisoned if he returned to Saudi Arabia, he applied for political asylum in the United Kingdom.
[3] In 2015, he expressed concern that British authorities might have been delaying his request for political asylum in order to force him and his family to return to Saudi Arabia.