Reading through a lot of news on Syria this morning. Will post as I go through the most relevant stuff. The following link to the paper written by Raphaël Lefèvre at CarnegieEndowmentOrg is very comprehensive..it's long and I haven't read more than a few pages of it.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the most powerful group in Syria’s exiled political opposition network. It is also emerging as a significant presence in rebel-held territory in northern Syria, where it is rebuilding its grassroots movement after thirty years in exile. But the Brotherhood’s success in the next stage of the Syrian revolution depends on its ability to address several significant challenges.....
.....Active in rebel-held territory in northern Syria ever since the Syrian uprisings started in March 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood is about to rebuild its base in Syria after thirty years of absence. The Islamist organization was outlawed after waging a bitter military struggle against the Baath regime of then Syrian president Hafez al-Assad from 1976 to 1982, but the head of the group recently declared that “the movement will go into action” across the country within months.
The Brotherhood began publishing a newspaper in Syria mid-February. It will soon launch its own television channel broadcasting in the north of the country and open local offices in the liberated cities. And it plans to establish a political wing to compete in future elections and predicts that it could win as much as 25 percent of the vote.1 Even the current regime seems to believe that the only real alternative to its rule would be a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Syria.
But, for all the Brotherhood’s history of opposition to the Baath Party, its prominent influence over the political opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and its optimistic electoral predictions, is the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood really ready to rule a post-Assad Syria? ..........
..........The Brotherhood has spent decades rebuilding networks inside Syria, and recent trends suggest that the organization is now ready to quickly expand. One group in particular is set to play a powerful role in the Syrian Brotherhood’s reconstruction: the Islamist youth. These self-described “sons and daughters of the Brothers” provide the Muslim Brotherhood with a golden opportunity to renew the pool of its membership, galvanize its troops, and refresh the image of the group......
........The Brotherhood’s primary concern is security, which helps explain its reluctance to expand too quickly. In the 1970s and 1980s, Syrian intelligence moles managed to penetrate the Islamist group and the regime successfully thwarted plans for coups d’état and mass defections of soldiers. This is certainly something the Muslim Brotherhood wishes to keep from happening again, and it helps explain why, until recently, applications for membership were restricted to the relatives of Islamist militants who already belong to the organization—and are therefore entirely trusted. ..........
Roula Khalaf and Abigail Fielding-Smith writing at FinancialTimes:
.....The Muslim Brotherhood is set to open offices inside Syria for the first time since the organisation was crushed there decades ago, in an apparent effort to capitalise on the increasingly Islamised rebellion.
Riad al-Shaqfa, the movement’s exiled leader, said in an interview with the Financial Times that a decision was recently taken to revive organisational structures inside Syria and followers have been asked to start opening party offices in rebel-held areas......
.....Mr Shaqfa said the Brotherhood has only 10 per cent of the seats on the Syrian National Council, which is now part of the Coalition, and had followed others, rather than led, in the election of Ghassan Hitto as interim prime minister. Though Mr Shaqfa is not opposed to expanding the Coalition, he said: “There is a group outside the coalition which wants to get in and so they say we control the coalition which isn’t true.”
The Brotherhood, however, is more organised than others, and it is also flexible in its positions, which creates suspicion over its motives. “If we haven’t pushed to form the Syrian National Council it would not have been formed, because there were no other parties. Others were not organised or strong,” said Mr Shaqfa.....
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