In For the Kill

By Scott MacLeod/Damascus

Bashar Assad likes to be seen. In Damascus, the Syrian President is often spotted dining at a smart restaurant with his wife Asma or driving his family to their weekend retreat in the mountains. Since succeeding his father Hafez as President in 2000, Assad has left the dirty work of running Syria's ruthless intelligence and security organs to two members of his clan--his brother Maher, 37, commander of the Presidential Guard, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, 55, chief of Syrian military intelligence. They haven't always got along. About five years ago, Maher shot Shawkat in the stomach during a family dispute. Assad played the conciliator and eventually brought Shawkat, who is married to Assad's sister, into the family's ruling troika. Since then Maher and Shawkat have become a feared and shadowy duo, their lives bound together by a shared aversion to publicity and a willingness to use violence to settle scores. "The best way to understand Syria," says a veteran foreign-policy hand in Washington, "is to check out the season collection of The Sopranos."

It is a fitting analogy, because like the fictional New Jersey Mob family, the Assads could be facing the end of their run. A long-awaited United Nations report last week implicated the Syrian regime in the assassination last February of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri--and specifically fingered Maher Assad and Shawkat as playing leading roles in the violent conspiracy. The report, by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, reconstructs the events that it says led up to the car-bomb murder of Hariri, including the August 2004 meeting in Damascus during which Bashar Assad threatened the billionaire Lebanese politician if he got in the way of Syria's domination of Lebanon.

The Assad government has angrily rejected the U.N. findings as baseless, charging that they rest on the hearsay of faithless witnesses, though a Syrian spokesman has also held out the possibility of giving better cooperation to U.N. investigators in the future. But Syria's problems aren't about to go away. Mehlis says he needs two more months to complete his inquiry because of the Assad government's halfhearted cooperation. That charge gave fresh ammunition to Syria's critics in Washington and Europe, who are threatening to pursue economic sanctions against the regime if it fails to make a full accounting of its role in the Hariri hit. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is consulting with allies and, according to State Department officials, as early as this week may push in the U.N. Security Council for resolutions condemning Syria. A top State Department official says the U.S. wants the resolutions to cite not just the Hariri assassination but also "the various aspects of Syria's destabilizing behavior in the region"--ranging from Syria's suspected support for jihadist fighters in Iraq to its sheltering of leaders of militant Palestinian groups like Hamas.

How much trouble does Assad face? Rice said last week that the U.S., while not currently contemplating using military force to overthrow Assad's regime, does expect a "change in behavior," in particular an end to Syrian meddling in Iraq and Lebanon. For Assad, the risk is that mounting international pressure, perhaps in the form of sanctions, could undermine his authority at home--a thought that has sent Syrians into a quiet frenzy of speculation. What was once imponderable--the end of the Assad family's 35-year hold on power--is suddenly being discussed as if it is a real, if still distant, possibility. "People are edgy, jumpy and scared," says Marwan al-Kabalan of the Center for Strategic Studies at Damascus University. "This is the most serious crisis in the recent history of Syria."

A struggle for power in Damascus would be messy. Syrians say their worst nightmare is a political vacuum that leads to a civil war between the country's Sunni Muslims, who constitute 74% of the population, and its Alawites, a minority sect that claims 12% of Syrians, including the Assads. Many Sunnis harbor bitter memories of the regime's killing of 20,000 people in Hama in 1982, while the Alawites fear that Islamist groups will someday seek to avenge the slaughter. "It's a scary thing," says Joshua Landis, an American professor who has spent the past 10 months in Syria. "We don't know how bad things could get."

Whether the country plunges into the abyss depends on how Assad handles the pressure on his government, both inside and outside the country's borders. Since coming to power, Assad, 40, has sought to cast himself as a reformer by allowing a degree of political openness and putting economic policy in the hands of free-market technocrats. "The President wants an open, prosperous, stable Syria that is fully integrated in the global economy," says Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Dardari. But observers of the regime say Assad has been unable--or unwilling--to curb the excesses of the country's security apparatus. Though he has gradually replaced his father's Old Guard, the new faces still run fiefdoms and amass wealth through corruption in exchange for loyalty to Assad.

But in recent months the President's ability to control events has slipped. Some government insiders criticize Assad for allowing the country to be drawn into a diplomatic row with the U.S. and failing to stop the popular protests against Syria in Lebanon this spring, which forced the withdrawal of Syrian troops. Syrian dissidents are more determined than ever to speak out. Days before the Mehlis report was released, members of 14 opposition parties and rights groups signed the Damascus Declaration, calling for a democratic constitution that would push Assad's regime out of power. The secret police broke up a press conference called by three activists but refrained from arresting anyone. Sipping a beer in a Damascus cafe afterward, one of the signers, Akram al-Buni, warned that the next step would be a call for street protests and civil disobedience. "The regime is encircled and weak," he says.

Among some Syrians, there is growing suspicion that feuding within the regime may have caused the death this month of Ghazi Kenaan, the Interior Minister who was Syria's intelligence chief in Lebanon from 1982 to 2002. The government declared that Kenaan, in despair over media reports about his interrogation by the U.N. investigators, had committed suicide at his desk. But Mehlis' 54-page report, released nine days after Kenaan's death, made only brief mention of the dead man--fueling speculation that Kenaan was coerced to take his own life or was murdered, either to eliminate a potential Alawite challenger to Assad's rule or to prevent him from further assisting the U.N. inquiry.

For the many Syrians who have grown impatient with the thuggish tactics of the Assad regime, the U.N. investigation into Hariri's death is likely to stoke more outrage. The report not only provides a rare glimpse into the workings of Syria's police state; if its findings are true, it also makes a devastating case that Assad family members were complicit in state-sponsored murder. The report, quoting an unidentified Syrian witness "who claims to have worked for the Syrian intelligence services in Lebanon," says that senior Syrian and Lebanese security chiefs first decided to kill Hariri last September. A month later, the U.N. report says, a Lebanese security chief who worked closely with the Syrians told a visitor, "We are going to send him on a trip--bye-bye, Hariri." The witness said conspirators then held meetings at various locales in Damascus, including Shawkat's office. And the witness told investigators that two weeks before the assassination, Shawkat held a final planning session at his own residence and forced a Lebanese fundamentalist being used as a decoy to videotape the claim of responsibility that was broadcast on al-Jazeera the day of Hariri's death.

Assad is facing an excruciating dilemma. Calming the furor over the regime's suspected involvement in Hariri's death may ultimately require him to turn over his brother and brother-in-law for questioning, a move that could trigger a revolt by their loyalists. For that reason, many Syrians believe that Assad is unlikely to provide investigators with the level of cooperation they demand. But further evidence of Syrian obstruction could give the West the pretext it needs for sanctions that could cripple the regime. It's no surprise that Assad has kept a low profile since the release of the Mehlis report. A presidential confidant, Bouthaina Shaaban, says Assad feels "considerate and thoughtful about the situation but confident that we are doing the right thing." He doesn't have room for error.

With reporting by George Baghdadi/Damascus, Elaine Shannon/Washington