As is the fifteenth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes s, a voiceless alveolar sibilant. It joins on both sides, so it keeps a connected run going rather than breaking it, and takes initial, medial, final and isolated shapes according to where it falls.
Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of the sound with a preceding a. The prop or support that stands behind Syriac semkath and Hebrew samekh has no counterpart in the Mandaic name.
Fifteenth place is where samekh stands in the inherited sequence. Mandaic keeps three sibilants apart in writing, as, asz and ash, at the fifteenth, eighteenth and twenty-first places, matching the Aramaic set exactly even where the spoken language has since blurred some of the distinctions between them.
The spelling of the name is a convention of the modern character standard rather than a fact about the letter. As, at fifteen, and asz, at eighteen, both write an s sound, one plain and one emphatic, and a naming scheme with no diacritics available has to keep them apart somehow. It does it by spelling the emphatic one with sz. Nothing in Mandaic corresponds to that z, and a reader should not take it for a separate sound.
The three sibilants do not behave alike on the page. As and asz join on both sides while ash joins only to the right, so one of the three forces a break in a word and the other two do not. Nothing about the sounds predicts that; the joining behaviour of each letter was settled separately.