Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood rises to help lead opposition

After three decades of persecution that virtually eradicated its presence, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has resurrected itself to become the dominant group in the fragmented opposition movement pursuing a 14-month uprising against President Bashar Assad.
Exiled Brotherhood members and their supporters hold the biggest number of seats in the Syrian National Council, the main opposition umbrella group. They control its relief committee, which distributes aid and money to Syrians participating in the revolt. The Brotherhood is also moving on its own to send funding and weapons to the rebels, who continued to skirmish Saturday with Syrian troops despite a month-old UN-brokered cease-fire. The revival marks an extraordinary comeback for an organization that was almost annihilated after the last revolt in Syria, which ended in the killing by government forces of as many as 25,000 people in the city of Hama in 1982. Only those who managed to flee abroad survived the purge.
The Brotherhood’s rise is stirring concerns in some neighboring countries and in the wider international community that the fall of the minority Alawite regime in Damascus would be followed by the ascent of an Islamist government, extending into a volatile region a trend set in Egypt and Tunisia. In those countries, Brotherhood-affiliated parties won the largest number of parliamentary seats in post-revolution elections.
Brotherhood leaders say they have been reaching out to Syria’s neighbors, including Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon — as well as to US and European diplomats — to reassure them that they have no intention of dominating a future Syrian political system or establishing any form of Islamist government.
“These concerns are not legitimate when it comes to Syria, for many reasons,” said Molham Al-Drobi, who is a member of the Brotherhood’s leadership and sits on the Syrian National Council’s foreign affairs committee.
“First, we are a really moderate Islamist movement compared to others worldwide. We are open-minded,” Al-Drobi said. ‘And I personally do not believe we could dominate politics in Syria even if we wanted to. We don’t have the will, and we don’t have the means.’
Of far greater concern to the United States and other Western countries are recent indications that hard-liners are seeking to muscle their way into the revolt, said Andrew Tabler, of the Washington Institute for Near East policy. The double suicide bombing in Damascus last week, in which 55 people died in circumstances reminiscent of the worst of the violence in Iraq, bore the hallmarks of an Al-Qaeda attack, deepening suspicions that militants have been relocating from Iraq to Syria. On Saturday, a group calling itself the Al-Nusra Front asserted responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on a militant website.
The Brotherhood is eager to distance itself from the militants, whose radical vision bears no resemblance to its philosophy. As the Brotherhood starts distributing weapons inside the country, using donations from individual members and from friendly states, it is going to great lengths to ensure that they don’t fall into the hands of extremists, Al-Drobi said.
“We have on the ground our networks, and we make sure they don’t distribute arms to those who are not within the streamline of the revolution,” Al-Drobi said.
Other leaders also stress the moderation of the group’s policies, even by comparison with the original Brotherhood movement in Egypt, to which the Syrian branch is very loosely affiliated.
Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood would support NATO intervention to help the opposition topple Assad, and it has published a manifesto outlining its vision of a future democratic state that makes no mention of Islam and enshrines individual liberties, said Mohammed Farouk Tayfour, who is the movement’s deputy leader, vice president of the Syrian National Council and head of the council’s relief committee, making him perhaps the most powerful figure in the opposition.
“In Tunisia and Egypt, the regime did not uproot the Islamic movement as they did in Syria,” he said, citing a 1980 law that made membership in the Syrian Brotherhood punishable by death. “Based on that, I would not expect to gain that much support after the fall of the regime.”
Syria’s long history of secularism and its substantial minority population also make it unlikely the Brotherhood would ever achieve the kind of dominance it appears to have won in Egypt or Tunisia, analysts and activists say. Al-Drobi predicted that the Brotherhood would win 25 percent of the vote if democratic elections were to be held.
Even that could be optimistic, experts say. A third of Syria’s population belongs to religious or ethnic minorities, among them Christians, Alawites, Shiites and Kurds, who share concerns about the potential rise of Islamism.
It is in large part a measure of the dysfunction of the rest of the opposition that the Brotherhood has asserted itself as the only group with a national reach, at a time when most of the uprising’s internal leadership is atomized around local committees that don’t coordinate, said Yezid Sayigh, of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
“There is no other political party outside of the Brotherhood that has organization across the country,” he said. The flow of weapons and money to fighters is one of the biggest concerns of secular Syrians, who worry that it will give the Brotherhood undue influence over the direction of the revolt and whatever may come after Assad, should the regime fall.
“The Muslim Brotherhood has played it really well. They’ve distanced themselves from extremism, and they’re trying to gain the middle ground,” said Amr Al-Azm, a Syrian dissident and history professor at Ohio’s Shawnee University who declined to join the Syrian National Council because he felt it was overly influenced by Islamists. But they are trying to make sure they have a finger in every pie and a hand on every lever of power that they can.

The Associated Press