Bidding for a Bigger Role: Syria seeks to become the prime Arab power

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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 superpower 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 aides. 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 (see box). 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