The United States Should be Prudent Regarding al-Sharaa’s Turn

Excerpt

When former al-Qaeda leader Ahmad al-Sharaa rose to power in Damascus with the fall of the Assad regime in 2024, the Muslim Brotherhood believed that its fortunes had changed. Long banned under the Assad regime, the Islamist group expected to stage an easy comeback because of Sharaa’s jihadi background. Instead, the former leader of the Nusra Front (which adopted the name Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) in 2017 in a rebranding effort to distance itself from its violent past) has sidelined the Muslim Brotherhood. Sharaa has even refused their request to reopen their offices. He is working overtime to consolidate his own power and also to potentially align Syria with anti-Brotherhood regional and Western powers.

The history of the Syrian government and the Muslim Brotherhood is marked by a tumultuous series of events. What began as a political struggle between the Islamist movement and the secular, pan-Arabist Ba’ath Party began just after the Ba’athist coup in 1963. Disagreements over the role of Islam and politics in Syrian society ultimately escalated to an armed insurgency by the Brotherhood in 1979. That conflict culminated with the government’s 1982 massacre in the town of Hama, which left thousands of militants and civilians dead in the Brotherhood’s largest stronghold in Syria. The Ba’athists leveled the town, crushed the Brotherhood as a political force inside Syria, and forced the group to establish a presence outside of Syria.

Exile undoubtedly disrupted the group’s ability to organize and operate, but it also allowed the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood to organize a robust opposition movement abroad. This was made abundantly apparent during the early days of the Arab Spring, the wave of protests that swept the Arab world in late 2010 and early 2011. As Islamist movements across the region positioned themselves as alternatives to the entrenched authoritarian regimes that were suddenly under duress, the Syrian Brotherhood sought to assert its dominance.

On the ground, the number of Brotherhood groups participating in the protests was “negligible.” Still, the Muslim Brotherhood found that it could assert its influence through the Syrian National Council (SNC), headquartered in Turkey. The Turks, along with the Qataris, had emerged as the top sponsors of the Brotherhood surge during the Arab Spring.

Jonathan Schanzer is the executive director at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @JSchanzer. Ahmad Sharawi is a research analyst at Foundation for Defense of Democracies.