Reform Party of Syria Should Substantiate "Muslim Brotherhood" Charge Against Activist

By Andrew Cochran

Yesterday, the Reform Party of Syria ("RPS"), one of the many Syrian dissident groups and a good source of information, sent a blast email charging the following: "The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB), in alliance with the ex-vice president of Syria Abdul Halim Khaddam, a staunch Ba'athist, have opened an office in Washington DC. The aim of the office is to infiltrate the US government to influence its apathy towards political Islam. RPS has learned that Ammar Abdul Hamid, a Syrian intellectual who works at Brookings Institute, will be running the office for the National Salvation Front. His duties are to sell political Islam and Ba'athism to reluctant US government officials and to give the Muslim Brotherhood a platform in the Think Tank community of Washington from which they can preach democracy."

Intrigued, I called the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, where Abdulhamid is a nonresident fellow, and asked for a response. They issued a press release last night stating: "Mr. Abdulhamid is not a member of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and has never been. He is not opening and will not be opening an office for the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and/or the National Salvation Front in Washington DC... Ammar Abdulhamid is a founding liberal member of the NSF, a broad-based, pragmatic coalition of Syrian opposition groups and independent liberal activists... Mr. Abdulhamid is also the director of the Tharwa Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving public information and discussion regarding diversity and human rights issues in the Arab world." A spokeperson for the Center also called me and vociferously denied it (and I mean really vociferously). You can read the press release here.

I conducted some research on Abdulhamid and asked two others (who asked to remain anonymous) who are well known in Washington for their expertise on Syrian dissident groups and the MB. I did the standard Google search on Abdulhamid and found his English-language personal blog site and another personal website, his Arabic-language site, the website of the Tharwa Project, and the website for DarEmar, which Abdulhamid describes as "a publishing house/NGO dedicated to raising the standards of civic awareness in the Arab World." I found nothing on the English-language sites which directly links him to the Syrian MB or leads me to believe he's a MB sympathizer. The Tharwa Project is opening an office in Washington, but I did not find any such announcement about the National Salvation Front (English site here and Arabic site here). The combined information from the two experts is (a) there is no explicit evidence that Abdulhamid is a MB member or sympathizer; (b) the National Salvation Front includes many anti-Assad elements, including MB; (c) the Tharwa Foundation, to the best of knowledge, doesn't have explicit ties to MB (and "Tharwa" means "fortune" in case you're wondering); and (d) it's possible, of course, that Mr. Abdulhamid has periodically entered, accidentally or purposefully, into a tactical relationship with MB types in the course of his work (but that's not apparent from the websites or the RPS press release).

I don't read Arabic and welcome readers' translations of the linked Arabic sites above. In the meantime, my conclusions are: (a) the RPS should either substantiate the charge or recant it; (b) I smell an internecine conflict between Syrian dissident groups which is not beneficial to their cause; and (c) Mr. Abdulhamid appears to be careful about his associations and, hopefully, will remain careful. My thanks to the Saban Center for their rapid response and to my two expert friends for their contributions. I will post updates to this story as needed.

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