The wreck may well have been an accident. Still, Basil Assad had been accumulating enemies. As head of a new presidential security corps, he cracked down hard on corrupt members of the country’s ruling clique, fellow members of islam’s dissident Alaouite sect. That seemed calculated to build his legitimacy among the country’s majority Sunnis. “He was preparing himself for the big job,” said one of his admirers in Damascus. Now no one knows who might take his place in his father’s plans.
