In For the Kill

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.