No
one in Syria expected the anti-regime uprising to last this long or be this
deadly, but after around 70,000 dead, 1
million refugees, and two years of unrest, there is still no end in
sight. While President Bashar al-Assad's brutal response is mostly to blame,
the opposition's chronic failure to form a viable front against the regime has
also allowed the conflict to drag on. And there's one anti-Assad group that is
largely responsible for this dismal state of affairs: Syria's Muslim
Brotherhood.
Throughout
the Syrian uprising, I have had discussions with opposition figures, activists,
and foreign diplomats about how the Brotherhood has built influence within the
emerging opposition forces. It has been a dizzying rise for the Islamist
movement. It was massacred out of existence in the 1980s after the Baathist
regime put down a Brotherhood-led uprising in Hama. Since then, membership in
the Brotherhood has been an offense punishable by death in Syria, and the group
saw its presence on the ground wither to almost nothing. But since the uprising
erupted on March 15, 2011, the Brotherhood has moved adroitly to seize the
reins of power of the opposition's political and military factions.
According
to a figure present at the
first conference to organize Syria's political opposition, held
in Antalya, Turkey, in May 2011, the Brotherhood was initially hesitant to join
an anti-Assad political body. The group had officially
suspended its opposition to the Baathist regime in the wake of
the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2009, and it pulled out of an alliance with Abdul
Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice president who defected in 2005.
The
Brotherhood nonetheless sent members to participate in the conference,
including Molhem Droubi, who became a member of the conference's
executive bureau. Meanwhile, it took steps to form fighting groups
inside Syria,
recruiting potential fighters and calling on its relatively meager
contacts on
the ground in Homs, Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo.
As
the idea of a unified opposition group to lead the popular revolt gained momentum,
the Brotherhood became more involved. A month after the meeting in Antalya, it
organized a conference in Brussels, attended by 200 people, mostly Islamists --
one of the first obvious fractures in the unity of the opposition. The
Brotherhood subsequently organized several conferences that formed opposition
groups to serve as fronts for the movement, allowing it to beef up its presence
in political bodies.
After
the conference in Brussels, at least three groups were
formed "to support the Syrian revolution." The organizations
continued to hatch, and a few months after the first conference they were
present in opposition bodies that later formed the core of the Syrian National
Council (SNC), an umbrella group that ostensibly represented all anti-Assad
forces. The council set aside seats for both the Brotherhood and members of the
Damascus Declaration, a group of Syrian reformists established in 2005 --
but the Brotherhood already had a significant presence within the Damascus
Declaration group.