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Muslim Brotherhood to disband?
On the face of it, a little-noticed report in a London-based Arabic-language newspaper last week seemed to signal a major victory in the Bush administration's international campaign to crack down on alleged financiers of Islamic terrorism. According to the Nov. 11 edition of Al-Sharq-al-Awsat, the Muslim Brotherhood Organization, an international fundamentalist movement that spawned many of the world's key Islamic extremist and terrorist groups—including Al Qaeda—recently held a secret conference at which its leaders discussed whether to dissolve their organization in the wake of Washington's moves to crack down on some of its leading members and corporate organizations.But like other developments in what the administration calls the global war on terror, the alleged move by the Brotherhood to abolish itself may have less substance than meets the eye. Indeed, it may even mean that efforts by the U.S. and its allies to move against financiers of Islamic terror groups will become more difficult. U.S. intelligence and diplomatic sources point out that some Arab nations banned the Brotherhood years ago. Notable among those countries is Syria, where former president Hafez Assad's brutal crackdown against the Brotherhood in the early 1980s left thousands of militants dead. Instead of driving the brotherhood out of business in Syria, however, the crackdown there forced some of its leading members into exile in countries like Germany, where Syrian Brotherhood expatriates ultimately helped to recruit to the cause of Islamic jihad a group of Hamburg polytechnic students who later became 9/11 hijackers. Other Brotherhood activists in Syria simply went underground for years, only to resurface later inside Syria with new organizational names, under which the current Syrian government of the current Syrian president, Bashar Assad, son of Hafez, allows them to operate under the watchful eye of security agencies. U.S. government experts acknowledge that if the Brotherhood does dissolve itself, its local branches will probably just lie low for a while and then resurface under new names. The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 as a religious and quasi-political counterweight to the corrupt and increasingly decadent royalist and colonial governments dominating the Islamic world, always has had two faces: one a peaceful public, proselytizing and social-welfare oriented wing; the other a clandestine, paramilitary wing. The militant arm has engaged sporadically in violent campaigns to resist or overthrow what the Brotherhood regarded as corrupt local tyrannies, like the Egyptian monarchy. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-12-21 |
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