IN 1987, following the kidnapping of Terry Waite, Hafez al-Assad moved his army down from Mount Lebanon into the Lebanese capital, Beirut. His government announced that Beirut was, at last, secure. Foreigners were invited to return under Syrian protection.

Six months later I went back and was promptly kidnapped a few hundred yards from a Syrian army checkpoint. The Hizbollah guerrillas who captured me were issuing a challenge to Assad's authority. Syria might control Beirut but not the Shi'ite suburbs where I was taken. Assad bided his time, and a few years later Hizbollah had not only released all its foreign hostages but was timing its attacks on Israeli forces in south Lebanon to his timetable rather than theirs.

Assad's patience was legendary. When the Israelis destroyed his air force during their 1982 invasion of Lebanon and occupied Beirut, he did not engage them in battle. He let Lebanon's militias, whom he armed, grind Israel down. Israel made retreat after retreat, drawing lines of engagement farther south each time, until it had lost more than 900 soldiers by their abrupt withdrawal last month.

Similarly, he waited out the Americans, who sent Marines to Beirut from 1982 to 1984. It is unlikely Assad did not know who blew up two American embassies and the Marines' headquarters, where 241 US servicemen died in 1983. The Marines sailed away in February 1984, humiliated by Assad. Yet the US gladly ceded power to him in Lebanon, cajoled him into sending his forces to support the US against Iraq in 1991 and was still courting him in March when President Clinton met him in Geneva.

The first time I saw Assad was in April 1974, when he raised the Syrian flag in Queneitra. The Israelis had just evacuated the Golan capital under an agreement negotiated by Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State. While the crowds were exultant, Assad was quietly dignified. He promised not to permit any attacks, by his forces or the Palestinian commandos, through the new Golan lines.

That promise was kept, forcing the Israelis to respect him above all their other enemies. Assad also promised to rebuild and repopulate the city, which the Israelis had demolished before withdrawing. Queneitra remains an empty shell, 26 years later, but Assad's broken promises were forgotten in a Syria that been given its longest period of political continuity.

During the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, I remember hearing Syrians in Damascus recite a poem that concluded: So, you Israelis, if you dare to come on / The lion awaits you in the Golan.

The lion was their president, Assad, whose family name means "lion". His regime was barely three years old - a record for longevity by the standards of independent Syria even then. No one expected him to last 30 years. A former air force commander, he made himself prime minister in November 1970 and president three years later. His was the last of the many coups that began in 1949 with the CIA-supported putsch of Colonel Hosni Zaim.

Last March a farcical referendum gave him 99.9 per cent support for his fifth seven-year term. The fact that parliamentarians in session and the television news reader who announced his death all wept is an indication that those in power wish he had lived out his term.

If Assad's father had not advanced socially in their northern village of Qardaha, he would not have been able to improve on the original family name of Wahhish. Wahhish means "savage".