TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/83/83capts.7

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                                                                                December 19, 1983

SYRIA

Bidding for a Bigger Role


With cunning and ruthlessness, Syria seeks to become the prime
Arab power


In the heart of old Damascus sits the filigreed stone tomb of
Saladin, the 12th century sultan who ruled an empire stretching
from Cairo to Baghdad. Worshipers bound for the gleaming
Umayyad mosque pass by without pausing, and children scamper in
a nearby courtyard oblivious of his presence. Yet as the
premier potentate of the region, the conqueror of Jerusalem and
the fearless warrior who helped crush the Crusaders, Saladin
united a divided region and set off a burst of pride among his
people that glowed for centuries.

Though aspirations and methods have been adjusted to the
realities of the 1980s, the passion for hegemony lives on in
Damascus. Under the shrewd, ruthless, brutally dictatorial
guidance of President Hafez Assad, 53, Syria has been making a
bid for the past decade to grasp the torch of Arab unity and
emerge as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East. By keeping
its 62,000 troops in Lebanon and by supporting factions opposed
to the government of Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, Syria has
become the key player in that fractured country's future. By
fueling the raging rebellion within the Palestine Liberation
Organization against Chairman Yasser Arafat, Syria is intent on
seizing control of the Palestinian movement. Finally, by
bullying and cajoling its Arab neighbors, Syria is building
what it hopes will be a united front to reach its ultimate
objective: a comprehensive, made-in-Damascus solution to the
Arab-Israeli conflict.

In pursuing those goals, Syria is pushing the battle-scarred
region perilously close to yet another major war. Even if
Syria does not risk confronting the U.S. as directly as it did
in the skies over Lebanon last week, Assad has forced both the
U.S. and the Soviet Union to become more deeply and more
dangerously entwined in the Middle East muddle than perhaps
either superpower would like. After its humiliating rout by
Israeli force during their 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon,
Syria has rebuilt its stock of military hardware to even greater
levels with help from its chief sponsors, the Soviets.

Though the Reagan administration initially sent U.S. Marines to
Beirut last year to ensure the safe departure of Yasser
Arafat's brigades from the Lebanese capital, Assad has helped
keep U.S. forces mired there far longer than Washington
anticipated. Faced with an Israeli-Lebanese accord that
provided for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon but
failed to take account of Syria, Assad responded by stoutly
refusing to pull out his own soldiers and by stirring the embers
of hatred among the country's myriad factions against Israelis
and Americans alike. The Reagan Administration, moreover, is
convinced that Syria had prior knowledge of, and perhaps even
masterminded, the October suicide-bombing of U.S. Marine
headquarters in Beirut that killed 240 servicemen. For the past
two months, Syrian antiaircraft batteries have taken potshots
at U.S. reconnaissance planes over Syrian-controlled parts of
Lebanon; when the barrage intensified two weeks ago, the U.S.
responded with its Sunday-morning reprisal raid. With each
passing week, Syria seems to grow bolder in striking out at the
U.S. presence in Lebanon. Says a Syrian foreign ministry
official:  "Assad will do anything to convince the Americans
that the road to peace must lead through Damascus, and this
includes showing the Americans he can hurt them."  With both
U.S. and Soviet soldiers in the region, that strategy also risks
igniting a super-power clash.

At home, Assad has brought a stable government to a country
that had rarely experienced that phenomenon before he came to
power 13 years ago. His durability is especially noteworthy
considering that Assad belongs to the Alawite sect, an offshoot
of Shi'ite Islam that accounts for only 13% of his country's 9.6
million people (most of the rest are Sunni Muslims). Assad's
long tenure has, however, been purchased at great cost. The
regime cruelly silences opponents both at home and abroad,
maintains a standing army of 275,000, and has five intelligence
agencies to keep watch on the citizenry.

In recent weeks the state of Assad's health, always a crucial
question in a one-man regime like Syria's, has become a subject
of intense worldwide speculation. Syrian officials announced
last month that their leader had suffered an attack of
appendicitis. That diagnosis lost credibility when the patient
failed to reappear for two weeks and word spread that he had
had his appendix removed 20 years ago. Filmed news footage of
Assad ostensibly sitting at a table with top officials and, a
few days later, inspecting a bridge in Damascus, showed him to
be wan and moving stiffly. Indeed, Arab diplomats began saying
privately that the film had almost certainly been faked and that
Assad remained seriously ill.

Western diplomats in Damascus believe that Assad, who is
diabetic, suffered a serious but not critical vascular
incident, most likely a heart attack, and that he is slowly
mending. According to Israeli intelligence sources, Assad has
been instructed by doctors not to talk, so instead he spends
his waking hours scribbling notes to aids. While both U.S. and
Israeli officials believe that Assad is in full command of his
senses, the consensus is that it will be some time before the
Syrian President can resume his usual 18-hour workdays. There
are conflicting rumors about who is running the country.
Sources ranging from P.L.O. officials to Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir have told reporters that a five-man council was
making decisions, but hard facts are an elusive commodity in
Damascus. Among the men reported to be on the committee are
Rifaat Assad, Hafez's younger brother and the tough-hearted head
of internal security, Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam and
Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas. Even if Assad should die or
become seriously incapacitated, sparking a ferocious power
struggle, U.S. officials expect little change in Syrian policy
once a successor emerges. "Damascus would be no less hostile
to Israel and the U.S. and no less militarily dependent on the
Soviet Union," says a U.S. analyst. "Syria is going to pursue
the same pattern of behavior no matter who is in charge."

The side of Syrian behavior that can perhaps be understood best
is its activity in Lebanon. Syrians consider Lebanon to be
part of "Greater Syria," a vague concept of territorial grandeur
that thrives more in memory than in reality. Indeed, the two
countries share more than a millennium of history. Both
Lebanon and Syria achieved independence in the 1940s, but
cultural and family ties still bind their populations, the
Sunnis and the Druze. "We are one people," says a Syrian farmer
living near the Lebanese border. "We go back and forth as if
it were one nation."  The ports of Beirut and Tripoli are
Damascus' main links with the sea, while Syria serves as
Lebanon's land route to Arab markets. For 28 years, until 1948,
the two countries used the same currency, the Lebanese-Syrian
pound. Tradition dictates that a new Lebanese President's first
foreign trip is to Damascus (Amin Gemayel's maiden visit,
scheduled for Nov. 13, was postponed because of Assad's
illness). Says a Syrian official:  "Lebanon is the one issue
on which any Syrian President would be prepared to take the
greatest risk."

Indeed, Assad risked violent opposition at home and a cut in
Arab aid when he invaded Lebanon in 1976. Syria's ostensible
allies, the P.L.O. and a coalition of leftist Muslim forces,
were about to crush the right-wing Christian militias when the
Syrian army came to the rescue. Nearly five months later an
Arab summit legitimized the Syrian presence under the rubric
"Arab Deterrent Force," and Assad's soldiers have stayed ever
since. Meantime, the Syrians have fought the Christians, whom
they once saved from defeat, on several occasions. At some
point or another, every Lebanese faction has sought Syria's
help. Syria's prominent role in Lebanese politics is as much
a result of Lebanon's invitations as of interference by
Damascus. Currently the Druze, the Sunni leadership of Tripoli
and anti-Phalangist Christians are allied with Syria through the
National Salvation front, and Lebanon's mainstream Shi'ite
organization, Amal, has its own ties to Damascus. Together
these groups control all of Lebanon except Beirut, the
Phalangist enclave north of the capital and certain patches of
southern Lebanon where Israeli-sponsored militias operate.

By refusing to pull out its forces, Syria in effect scrapped
the Israeli-Lebanese accord of last May. That document, forged
with the help of Secretary of State George Shultz, called for
Israel to withdraw the 30,000 soldiers who remained in Lebanon
after the previous summer's invasion. Though Assad was angered
by being left out of the negotiations, he was even more livid
that the treaty gave Jerusalem diplomatic and trade privileges
with Lebanon. That collided with Assad's notion that Syria must
not only retain influence in Lebanon, but ensure that Israel
has none. Assad was virtually handed a veto over the treaty
when Israel and the U.S. quickly signed a side letter saying
the agreement would not be enforced unless Syria pulled its
troops out as well. Says a senior west European diplomat in
Damascus: "inept diplomacy by the U.S. and Israel made it easy
for Assad to block what he least wanted. Lebanese concessions
to Israel."

Israel decided in September to pull its forces back a few miles
to more defensible positions along the Awali River, a move that
emboldened Syria. The strategic retreat, which took place
before the Lebanese Army could fill the vacuum, allowed
Syria-backed Druze and Palestinian forces to drive the Christian
Phalangist militiamen out of the strategic Chouf Mountains. The
fierce fighting produced a cease-fire agreement that favored
the interests of Syria and its Lebanese proxies. The primary
gain: Gemayel was forced to convene a reconciliation conference
in Geneva to redistribute national power more fairly. Syria
was granted an official role and dispatched to the talks.

The meeting brought other accomplishments. The participants
agreed to "freeze" the Israeli-Lebanese accord and identity."
the next step comes when the Lebanese warlords are scheduled to
reconvene in Geneva. Both Washington and Jerusalem want to
retain the substance of the Lebanese-Israeli agreement; Assad
considers it dead. If the pact is killed, according to a
Western diplomat, Damascus is prepared to accept Gemayel as
Lebanese president and work with him to restructure the
country's government. Assad and Gemayel were scheduled to meet
in Damascus in mid-November, but the Syrian leader's illness
intervened. The Lebanese and Syrian foreign ministers, however,
have met three times, most recently last week.

Meanwhile Israeli troops continue to suffer casualties and
antagonize local Shi'ites in southern Lebanon, and the U.S.
Marines remain vulnerable in Beirut. Syria loses nothing by
staying put. Says a Western diplomat in Damascus:  "Assad
knows that Israel is in a no-win situation that saps its
military strength and that the Marines cannot stay in Lebanon
forever. He is content to wait out both."

Syria's relations with most other Arab countries range from
mutual distrust to outright hatred. Saudi Arabia and the rest
of the Persian Gulf oil states give Damascus more than $1
billion a year in cash, partly because they deem it essential
to have at least one strong Arab state confronting Israel. But
the payment also serves as a form of protection money to ensure
that Assad does not try to overthrow those conservative regimes.
Kuwait, with its large population of Syrian guest workers,
feels especially vulnerable. "Assad is a very bright man, but
he also is very mean," says  United Arab Emirates official. The
Syrian leader and Jordan's King Hussein always have been deeply
suspicious of each other. Assad grew furious last April when
the monarch held talks with Arafat on President Reagan's 1982
peace plan, which called for linking the Israeli-occupied West
Bank and Gaza Strip in a loose association with Jordan. In
October, when Arafat talked about renewing his discussions with
Hussein, the Jordanian capital, Hussein read the terror campaign
as a message from Damascus:  Don't resume talks with Arafat --
or else.

Syria's ties with renegade non-Arab Iran, on the other hand,
have been highly profitable for Damascus. When the Iran-Iraq
war broke out in 1980,  Assad, who has long been bitterly
opposed to the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, rushed to support
the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Aside from giving Damascus an
estimated $600 million in cheap oil, the Ayatullah has bestowed
his blessing on Assad's minority Alawites, a sect that most
Sunnis consider heretical. In return, Damascus has shut down
the Iraqi oil pipeline that slices across Syria to the
Mediterranean, thereby slowing the flow of petrodollars to the
financially strapped Baghdad government.

According to Western and Israeli intelligence agencies, Syria
gave at least tacit approval -- and possibly more -- to the
Iranian terrorists who launched suicidal attacks against the
American and French headquarters in Beirut and Israeli army
offices in Tyre two months ago. Based in Baalbek, which is in
Syrian-controlled eastern Lebanon, the Iranians acted under the
auspices of Islamic Amal, a radical Shi'ite Muslim militia that
broke away from the larger and more moderate Amal organization
in early 1982. But they could not have undertaken the murderous
task if Syria had disapproved. Says a Western diplomat:  "The
Syrians did not control and organize the operations, but certain
elements in the Syrian regime knew what was going to happen and
decided not to act."

Syria's hand is more visible in the continuing campaign to
destroy Arafat. Though Assad and the PLO chieftain have worked
together in the past, the strains were always there. As early
as 1969, when Assad was Defense Minister, he tried to regulate
the activities of PLO guerrillas in Syria. As President, he
supported Arafat's avowed enemy Abu Nidal, a rogue PLO leader
who ran the Black June terrorist group. After the Lebanese
civil war, Assad supported Beirut's right to impose rules on the
PLO even though the group was far stronger than the government.
While Assad saw the Palestinian cause as subordinate to his
wider vision of Arab unity, Arafat believed the PLO must remain
independent of any Arab nation. Differences in the personal
styles of the two men also played a part in their estrangement. A
lifelong military man, Assad is used to giving orders,
expecting them to be obeyed and staying out of public sight,
while Arafat, a thoroughly political animal, likes haggling,
cutting deals and basking in the spotlight of publicity.

Assad had long been looking for ways to clip Arafat, and the
opportunity arrived last May:  the PLO chief unwisely elevated
several unpopular commanders within Fatah, the paramilitary
group that he established and that still accounts for about 80%
of the PLO's military strength. Palestinian fighters, outraged
by Arafat's appointments and by his growing preference for
negotiation over combat, rose up in revolt. Encouraged by
Syria, and in some cases backed by Syrian troops and artillery,
the rebels gained strength through the summer and eventually
forced the loyalists out of Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and into
Tripoli. When Arafat joined his forces into Tripoli. when
Arafat joined his forces there in September, the time was ripe
for Assad to finish him off.

Instead, Syria blinked. As Arafat's forces retreated to
Tripoli after putting up a fierce fight against superior numbers
in the city's suburban refugee camps. it became clear that the
wily chairman could hold out longer than expected. The Saudis
and the Soviets, reluctant to see Arafat destroyed, began
putting considerable pressure on Syria to accept a cease-fire.
The pleas at first were ignored, but then Assad was
hospitalized. Though it is impossible to say what role the
President's illness played, Syria approved the alt in fighting.
"His sickness prevented Assad from engaging in the extensive
diplomacy necessary to resist the demands for a cease-fire,"
speculates a Western ambassador in Damascus. "Perhaps the
decision was made to take the easy way out."

The siege seriously weakened the PLO and should permit Assad
even more control over its affairs. The conflict, however,
will switch from open warfare to internal wrangling if Arafat
escapes from Tripoli and convenes a meeting of the PLO
leadership. In that arena, the deftly persuasive Arafat usually
triumphs. Though the rebel demands for "collective leadership"
may limit his authority, Arafat may not lose as much power as
Assad would desire. True, the revolt does make it nearly
impossible for Arafat to win support for reopening talks with
Jordan's Hussein on the Reagan peace plan, but the PLO leader
was unable to get such backing before the rebellion anyway.

Arafat's troubles are a good illustration of the complicated
relationship between the Syrians and the Soviets. By
midsummer, Moscow had let both Assad and Arafat know that it was
highly displeased wit the rift. Aside from having nothing to
gain from a fight between its two most valuable allies in the
region, Moscow valued Arafat as an alternative to Assad for
entry to the Arab world. Nonetheless, Syria pressed the fight
until deciding on its own, for whatever reason, to hold back.
Says a Damascus university professor:  "The Soviets know that
the Syrian decisions on Middle Eastern affairs, especially where
Lebanon and the PLO are concerned, will always be independent."

Created out of mutual need, the Soviet-Syrian marriage was
consecrated in 1980, when Assad's growing sense of isolation in
the Arab world and his burgeoning ambitions led him reluctantly
to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union, which always has been
eager to make friends in the Middle East. But for the next two
years Assad failed to appoint an ambassador to Moscow. The
devastating loss of an estimated $1 billion worth of military
equipment by the Syrians during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon
further dismayed the Soviets. After the war, however, Moscow
upgraded the arsenal by some $2 billion. The Soviets supplied
about 160 fighter aircraft, including advanced MiG-23s, to
replace the 96 planes downed in dogfights over the Bekaa
Valley. Some 800 T-72 tanks have been added to Syrian divisions,
well above the number of older and smaller T-54s and T-55s lost
in Lebanon. The Soviets have also shipped about 200 armored
personnel carriers and between 600 and 800 trucks, considerably
enhancing the mobility of Syrian troops.

Moscow added a new element of instability to the region by
installing the SA-5 missiles. With its range of 186 miles and
electronic homing devices, the SA-5 is regarded as the most
sophisticated surface-to-air missile in the Soviet inventory.
Some 5,000 Soviet soldiers and technicians man the missile
batteries and communications centers, while 3,000 Soviet
advisers help train the Syrian army. Western military officials
estimate that six to nine new SS-21 surface-to-surface missiles
have been delivered and are being used for training. Though the
Syrians already possess SCUD-B missiles, with nearly double the
range of the SS-21s (167 miles vs. 75 miles), the new missiles
are more accurate. In addition, the Syrians are boosting the
number of missile launchers from 36 to 54. The recent
deliveries are in line with Syria's policy of constantly
improving its military capabilities, but they have led Syrian
Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas to indulge in saber rattling.
"The Negev is within the range of our missiles," he boasted in
an interview with a Lebanese magazine. The Negev desert, about
200 miles from Damascus, is home is the Israeli nuclear reactor
and several major airfields.

Assad's wily relationship with Moscow is very much in character
for a politician Richard Nixon once described as having
"elements of genius."  A onetime jet-fighter pilot, Assad is a
cautious and pragmatic leader who nonetheless appreciates the
uses - and limits -- of brinkmanship. Unfailingly courteous,
the Syrian President inevitably begins meetings with a disarming
jest before buckling down to what can become six hours of hard
negotiating. "He gives his thoughts away bit by bit, like
peeling an onion," says a Western diplomat. "He will just keep
talking until you get tired."  Assad has a superb grasp of
detail and rarely refers to notes. On the other hand, he
prefers to speak in generalities that sometimes are so ambiguous
that diplomats leave his presence scratching their heads.

His decision making can be equally mysterious. After listening
expressionlessly to his small knot of Western-educated
advisers, Assad usually retires to read voraciously about the
question at hand, then flatly announces a decision, often by
telephoning an aide late at night. Sometimes Assad holes up at
his vacation home near the Mediterranean port of Latakia for
several days and then returns with a series of directives.
Neither a smoker nor a drinker, Assad, the father of five
children, lives quietly with his wife Anisa in a heavily guarded
villa in Damascus, 100 yards from his office. So enigmatic is
Assad that his aides have dubbed him "the Sphinx."

Even before he fell ill, the President was rarely seen in
public. A joke is told in Damascus about he father and son who
wait for days outside the presidential compound to catch a
glimpse of Assad. Suddenly, a motorcade with sirens wailing
roars down he street. As a Mercedes with blacked-out windows
whizzes by, the beaming father turns to his son and says, "Now
you can say you have seen the President."

Born in an Alawite farming town near Latakia in 1930, Assad
grew up keenly aware that he belonged to what was then the
country's poorest and least-educated minority. The oldest son
in a large family, Hafez credits his peasant father with
instilling a strong nationalistic fervor in him, but at the same
time reminding him to take pride in his Alawite heritage and the
family name, which means "lion."  Hafez plunged into political
activism in high school, delivering fiery speeches against
French rule. By about the time Syria gained full independence
in 1946, Assad had joined the Baath party, which preaches a
mixture of socialism and Arab nationalism.

Few career paths were open to a non-Sunni in those days, so
Assad's ambition led him to enter the air force college in
1952. His flying talent won him the best-aviator trophy upon
graduation, but Assad's real interest remained politics.
Disgruntled over Syria's union with Egypt in the late 1950s, an
arrangement that he felt relegated Damascus to a secondary
role, Assad and his colleagues founded a secret military group
that helped the Baathists seize power in 1963. Assad became
commander of the air force the next year and Minister of Defense
in 1966. Though the Alawites ran the government, the 1967
Arab-Israeli war was followed by a split within the party that
pitted relative moderates like Assad against radical reformers
seeking stronger ties with the Soviet Union. In 1970, Assad
staged a bloodless coup and launched his "corrective movement."
He lifted martial law, which had been in effect since 1967,
halted the nationalization of industry and improved relations
with Egypt and the conservative gulf states. Syria felt it had
acquitted itself well in the 1973 war with Israel, vindicating
its pitiful performance six years earlier. Diplomatic ties with
the U.S., severed by the 1967 war, were resumed after Richard
Nixon's visit to Damascus in 1974. Supplemented by handouts
from the gulf states and revenues from its petroleum pipeline
during the oil boom of the mid-1970s, Syria enjoyed its most
prosperous years ever, with economic growth hitting an average
rate of 13% in 1978.

Then things started to sour. Syrian intervention in the
Lebanese civil war proved immensely unpopular at home and
triggered a wave of car bombs and assassination attempts against
government officials, including three attacks on Foreign
Minister Khaddam. Assad faced his most serious challenge from
the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamic group rabidly opposed
to Damascus' secular policies. In June 1979 the group gunned
down more than 60 cadets, mostly Alawites, at the Alepp military
academy. The next spring, a general strike in northern Syria
was stopped only after 12,000 troops killed hundreds and
arrested thousands.

If the Brotherhood's goal was to provoke more repression that
in turn would alienate more Syrians from the regime, it
succeeded. Since the late 1970s, the elaborate security
apparatus -- which includes the Mokhabbarat, the secret police
organization with some 20,000 to 30,000 members, and Saraya al
Difa, a praetorian guard run by Assad's merciless brother Rifaat
-- has grown more heavyhanded. After a bodyguard reportedly
tried to kill Assad with a hand grenade in June 1980 (the
President's life was saved when another guard threw himself on
the explosive), some 250 to 300 political prisoners were
massacred at Tadmur prison. In February 1982, when militants
rebelled in Hama, the country's fifth-largest city, an edgy
Assad responded by besieging the city of 200,000 for three weeks
and killing at least 10,000 residents.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International, the respected London-
based group that monitors human rights violations around the
world, released a 65-page report detailing abuses in Syria.
The account makes chilling reading. Thousands have been jailed
without charge, including former President Noureddine Atassi,
who has been held in Damascus' Mezza military prison since his
overthrow by Assad in 1970. Relatives of political suspects
are sometimes held hostage until officials find their man; in
one case, three family members were detained for nine years
before their release in 1980. Twenty-three types of torture are
listed in the report, including pouring boiling water on
victims, electric shock and sexual abuse. An oft-used tactic
is called dullab, in which a person is hung from a suspended
tire and beaten with cables and whips. In one testimony, a
15-year-old boy told of being whipped and threatened with
blindness if he did not reveal where his father was. Another
student described a soundproof torture room in Aleppo that
featured a machine called "the black slave."  Recounted the
youth:  "When switched on, a very hot and sharp metal skewer
enters the rear, burnings its way until it reaches the
intestines, then returns only to be reinserted."

The repression has increased the level of discontent, but not
active opposition. Assad, moreover, has cultivated an almost
fail-safe system against coups. Alawites occupy key posts in
the party and the military. The armed forces are under
separate command from the Mokhabbarat and the Saraya al Difa.
Though Defense Minister Tlas is a Sunni, only Alawite officers
are empowered to move strategically placed troops. Outfitted
with the best equipment, Rifaat's 15,000-strong forces are
stationed almost entirely around Damascus.

A more serious threat to the regime may be the country's
worsening economy. Plummeting oil revenues and bad harvests
have drained foreign reserves. According to an International
Monetary Fund report, Syria's total reserves (excluding gold)
dropped from $927 million in mid-1981 to $40 million by early
1982. Electricity is now rationed nationwide. Though
unemployment figures are not released by the government, more
people are out of work than a year ago and inflation is on the
rise. Syrians may not be going hungry, but foreign imports,
including television sets and kitchen appliances, have been
drastically cut. Consequently, the black market has exploded
into the open, and corruption has become more rampant than ever.
Even senior government officials openly smoke the Marlboros
that can only be bought illegally.

Assad's task of governing is complicated by the fact that while
Damascus may be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the
world, Syria is a relatively new country, where sectarian
identities compete with national loyalties. The old and the
new clash constantly; in the capital, women in black veils
brush shoulders with secretaries wearing cheap knockoffs of
West European fashions, while in the countryside the horse-drawn
plow has yet to give way to the tractor. The contrast can
sometimes be disconcerting. At graduation ceremonies for the
"Revolutionary Youth" group, teen-age girls still demonstrate
their newly acquired survival skills by biting live snakes
behind the head to kill them and then cooking the reptiles over
a campfire, to the delight of guests. Yet TV antennas bristle
over biblical villages, and favorite programs include such U.S.
fare as BJ and the Bear and Quincy.

Assad's primary way of cementing Syrian loyalty remains the
Arab cause, as it was Gamal Abdel Nasser's way in Egypt a
quarter of a century ago. "The masses pride themselves on the
fact that under Assad, Syria has been in the forefront of the
struggle against Israel," says a Western observer in Damascus.
One theory has it that the last thing Assad wants is a
settlement with Israel; only by remaining at daggers' point with
Jerusalem can the Syrian President justify the military machine
that safeguards his government. Says an Arab editor in Beirut:
"If peace suddenly broke out, the foundations of Assad's regime
would be pulled out from under him."  The prevailing view,
however, is that Assad welcomes a solution, but only on his
terms and at his pace.

Says a Western foreign policy analyst in Damascus:  "He is
looking for an agreement that will assure his place in the Arab
pantheon."

In a sense, Assad has already achieved is primary goal:  Syria
is at the fulcrum of events in the region. Israeli
intelligence officials argue that by stationing Marines in
Lebanon, the U.S. played into Syrian hands, since Washington,
in effect, put itself at the mercy of forces largely controlled
by Assad. If the U.S. could leave the Lebanese quicksand
tomorrow without losing face, and without the risk of causing
further chaos by doing so, some Administration officials
undoubtedly would grab the opportunity.

Despite the escalation of tensions, Damascus has told
Washington privately that it does not want to go to war over
Lebanon. If a conflict were to break out, however, Syria could
only gain; no matter how badly its forces fared against the U.S,
standing up the American giant would strengthen Syria's
credentials to be Arab standard-bearer. Though the terms of the
1980 Soviet pact with Damascus have never been revealed,
officials in Moscow have hinted that Soviet troops would enter
the fray only if Syrian territory were invaded. According to
British intelligence officials, Moscow would unleash the
Soviet-manned SA-5s to counter a full-scale Israeli move against
Syrian-held Lebanon, but it would hold its fire in the face of
a U.S. offensive, leaving it to the Syrians to retaliate.

Administration officials believe that the Syrian attacks on
U.S. reconnaissance planes were not an invitation to war but a
probing of how much the U.S. would take. Observes Joyce Starr,
a Middle East expert at Georgetown University's Center for
Strategic and International Studies:  "The Syrians are playing
decibel politics. They heighten tensions for a few days, then
lower them."  Some Washington officials believe that Syria,
after it stops testing U.S. resolve, will settle down and work
out a deal with Gemayel six months to a year from now. In this
view, once Gemayel shows progress -- no matter how scant -- in
mending his country, the U.S. Marines will come home.

Others contend that such an analysis is far too rosy. "Syria
will never leave Lebanon unless it is forced to evacuate," says
an Israeli general. Even if Syria is guaranteed influence in
Lebanese affairs, according to British diplomats, Damascus will
still insist on the return of the Israeli-occupied Golan
Heights as the price for its withdrawal from Lebanon. Sooner
or later, in the view of many Middle East experts in the U.S.
and Western Europe, Syria must be brought into negotiations for
a Palestinian homeland. As one senior British diplomat puts it:
"Like it or not, Syria is the key to a Middle East settlement."

Both Washington and Jerusalem seem reluctant to recognize that
reality. Even if they did, Assad would probably prefer not to
negotiate now. The Syrian President believes that the Arabs
should deal with jerusalem only when they are as strong
militarily as the Israelis, if not stronger. The Reagan
Administration, moreover, has shown no interest in the kind of
comprehensive talks, complete with Soviet representation, that
Syria has demanded. Leaving aside the question of whether
Moscow would be helpful or not, the White House is unwilling to
grant the Kremlin any more influence in the region.

In the meantime, the U.S.-Syrian relationship is likely to
contain more jolts as American reconnaissance planes continue
flying over Syrian antiaircraft batteries. America's long-term
difficulties in dealing with Syria stem partly from the fact
that, as one top U.S. diplomat put it, "our carrots and sticks
are not great."  By strengthening military ties with Israel two
weeks ago, the Reagan Administration signaled that it was
picking up the stick. Yet other Middle East experts point out
that America achieved its greatest success with Syria by using
carrots:  Secretary of State Kissinger shuttled to Damascus
more than 30 times to obtain a Syrian-Israeli disengagement
agreement on the Golan Heights, a pact that is still in force.
Says a staff member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations
Committee:  "In the current round, we've refused to engage in
that kind of stroking. We need to cater a bit to Assad's
vanity."

But the realities have changed since 1974, both for Assad at
home and in the Middle East at large. No longer is Syria a
third-rate military power. No longer is Egypt the unchallenged
leader of the Arab world, a change that has opened a power
vacuum for Damascus to fill. Now, and not then, Israeli
soldiers face Syrian troops across a tense 37-mile front in
Lebanon and 1,800 U.S. Marines are bunkered the Beirut. Assad's
illness, no matter how quickly he recovers, just complicates an
already impossible situation. "No war is possible without
Egypt, and no peace is possible without Syria," Henry Kissinger
once said It is a measure of how far Syria has come under Hafez
Assad that while the first part of that statement is no longer
completely valid, the last part rings truer than ever.


By James Kelly. Reported by Barret Seaman/Washington and
Roberto Suro/Damascus, with other bureaus.

____________________________________________________________
Saladin's Shaky Successors


To politicians and cartographers, Syria is an invention of the
20th century. To scholars, however, the term also refers to a
once vast, occasionally powerful, always proud empire. Greater
Syria, as historians call the broad area east of the
Mediterranean, has a long and bloody past. That region, which
included the territory of contemporary Syria, Lebanon, Jordan
and Israel, was situated at the approximate point where Europe,
Asia and Africa converge. As such, it was a traditional meeting
place and killing ground for peoples of both the East and the
West.

Over the millenniums, Syria has repeatedly been overrun by
conquerors from the desert or sea:  Canaanites, Phoenicians,
Hebrews, Arameans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks,
Romans, Nabataeans, Byzantines, Arabs. During the 7th and 8th
centuries A.D., Damascus flourished as the capital of the
Umayyad Empire, which stretched from Spain to India. In the
12th century the Crusaders' brief reign came to a violent end
at the hands of the warrior Saladin, who remains a Syrian folk
hero to this day. After Saladin's death, his domain fell to
stronger powers. Damascus was sacked and plundered in 1401 by
Tamerlane, the Turkic conqueror, and in 1517 it came under the
rule of the Ottoman Turks, where it languished for most of the
next 400 years.

That period ended at last in 1920, when Syria became an
independent monarchy under King Faisal I of the Hashemite royal
family. But Britain and France were at work redrawing the
region's boundaries. Faisal's sovereignty ended after only a
few months when the French claimed Syria under a League of
Nations mandate. To weaken the Arab nationalist movement, the
French created contemporary Lebanon by carving from Syria and
Christian region around Mount Lebanon, the predominantly Muslim
Bekaa Valley and the coastal cities of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon
and Tyre.

Even as they never forgave the Crusaders who overran their
homeland, the Syrians have never absolved the French for taking
territory from them. After World War II, France reluctantly
departed, and Syria became an independent republic. The
Syrians still celebrate April 17, the date of the 1946 French
withdrawal, as Evacuation Day.

As with so many countries born in the past 40 years, Syria's
modern history has been a saga of cops and countercoups. In
1958 Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser merged his country
with Syria to form the United Arab Republic, but the union
lasted only 3.5 years. In 1963 the Arab Socialist Resurrection
(or Baath) Party overthrew President Nazem Koudsi and seized
power in Damascus.

After leading a bloodless coup in 1970, Hafez Assad took over
and appeared to be a relative moderate. He signed a
disengagement agreement with Israel over the Golan Heights in
1974. He sent his army into Lebanon in 1976 to save the
Maronite Christians from defeat by the Palestine Liberation
Organization and a coalition of leftist Muslim forces. He told
TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn in 1977 that he was ready to make
peace with the Israelis if they would withdraw from the
territory they had captured in the 1967 war. But in the past
three years, as he has fought against internal challenges,
Assad's regime has become increasingly bloody and repressive.
In the region, he has aligned himself with two menacing Islamic
nationalists, Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini and Libya's
Muammar Gaddafi. By the time President Reagan announced his
peace initiative last year, Assad was fearful of Israeli gains
in Lebanon and disenchanted with U.S. diplomacy. In no mood for
negotiations, Assad believed that foreigners had trifled with
Syria long enough.

____________________________________________________________
His Brother's Keeper


They help keep the peace by extorting protection money,
threatening opponents with violence and even, it is said,
robbing the plushest homes in Damascus for pocket money. Living
in their own apartment buildings, publishing their own
newspapers, they are a law - a world, really - unto themselves.
Though their skintight dark green and strawberry-red camouflage
uniforms have earned them the nickname "The Pink Panthers," they
are certainly no pussycats. They are, says William Wuandt, a
Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, "very tough and
widely disliked."  In nearly every respect, the brutal,
well-trained and ill-disciplined Defense Companies, Syria's most
fearsome security network, reflect the characteristics of their
leader:  Rifaat Assad, 46, President Hafez Assad's younger
brother and closest aide.

With speculation rampant about the President's health and about
who is running Syria during his illness, Rifaat has emerged as
the central figure in the ten-member ruling inner circle. He
is also widely considered to be the man most likely to try to
succeed his brother. Ever since Hafez Assad first turned Syria
into a one-man show after seizing power in 1970, Rifaat has not
only served the regime with unflagging loyalty but has also had
a hand in most of the nation's bloodier actions. "He is the
one who keeps his brother in place," says one U.S. State
Department official. In the midst of Syria's cutthroat
factionalism, he may not be averse to taking that place himself.

"Shrewd and dangerous as a snake," as a general in Israeli
intelligence describes him, Rifaat flexes his muscles through
the 280 tanks and 15,000 troops of the Defense Companies.
Charged with the defense of metropolitan Damascus, Rifaat's men
have sometimes been called on to defend the government from
internal enemies. Last year, for example, they reportedly
executed around 100 air force officers who had tried to stage
a coup. In February 1982, some 8,000 of Rifaat's troops exacted
a bloody revenge against the rebellious Muslim Brotherhood in
the historic city of Hama, leaving most of the ancient quarter
in ruins and at least 10,000 civilians dead.

Rifaat's savagery at home has been complemented by his
smoothness abroad. He has cultivated Crown Prince Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia, whose government has given Syria an estimated $6
billion over the past five years. He has worked to conciliate,
and sometimes protect, PLO Leader Yasser Arafat. Last summer
President Reagan publicly thanked him when, through contacts in
the Iranian regime of Ayatullah Khomeini, Rifaat secured the
release of David Dodge, acting president of the American
University in Beirut, who had been kidnapped the previous year
and abducted to Iran.

Yet is Rifaat is the main guarantor of the regime's strength,
he is also a major source of its frailty. He allegedly sits
atop a nationwide ladder of corruption, an arrangement by which
government officials on the take share payoffs with their
immediate superiors. The bucks stop with Rifaat. Such shady
enterprises as extorting money from drug traffickers in the
Bekaa Valley and running guns throughout the Arab world have
reportedly given him a personal fortune of around $100 million.

While the President is an ascetic family man, Rifaat is an
outright hedonist with seven wives, countless mistresses and 17
children. After deciding to send two of his sons to college
near Washington, D.C., Rifaat last year spent $1.1 million on
a mansion in Potomac, Md., which he furnished with armed
guards, housekeepers and other retainers. Just one month later,
the house was severely damaged by a fire of unknown origin, and
the entire entourage apparently fled the country.

Despite their radically different habits, Rifaat and Hafez
Assad share the same political goals. As members of the Alawite
branch of Shi'ite Islam, both are determined to preserve the
sect's control. The Alawites have dominated Syria for 13 years,
mostly because of the adamantine grip of Hafez Assad. "In the
short term," says a Western diplomat, "there is no hope for a
non-Alawite breakthrough."  Yet were his older brother no
longer in control, Rifaat might find it politic to install as
a figurehead President a Sunni from the country's inner circle,
someone whose name is less sullied than his own. A likely
beneficiary of such a ploy might be Major General Mustafa Tlas,
the Defense Minister and a harsh critic of the U.S., who has
been hailed by Soviet Defense Minister Dimitri Ustinov as "the
greatest strategist in the Middle East."  Another Sunni front
runner is Chief of Staff Hikmmat Shehabi, an ambitious, somewhat
colorless soldier who was made Syria's official contact with the
U.S. diplomatic mission in Damascus ten years ago. During a
transition period, a third Sunni might also prove influential:
the abrasive, crisply competent Abdel Halim Khaddam, Foreign
Minister for more than ten years.

No matter who emerges as a potential successor to Hafez Assad,
the regime's reputation for ruthlessness is likely to remain
intact. Says Amiram Nir, a scholar at Tel Aviv University's
Center for Strategic Studies:  "The hands of all the caste
members [the inner circle] are dirty. They all share personal
involvement in "counterrevolutionary" bloodbaths."  The road to
power is therefore sure to be treacherous. Almost three years
ago, when Major General Naji Jamil, commander of the air force,
managed to ingratiate himself with Hafez Assad, Rifaat
interceded forcefully. Jamil was stripped of his power and
confined to his house, where he is kept under surveillance to
this day.