Ahram Online has posted a report an analysis on what is described as the phenomenon of “small factions of younger members of the Muslim Brotherhood” joining ISIS. The report begins:
September 2, 2015 It has been speculated, but this week it went from the assumed into the effectively announced: small factions of younger members of the Muslim Brotherhood are finding their way to join the most recent and harshest version of political Islamic militant groups: Islamic State (IS).
The frontpage story of the Cairo daily Al-Shorouk by Muslim Brotherhood expert-journalist Mohamed Khayyal quoted informed sources within the oldest political Islam group of a limited but significant split of a small group of younger Muslim Brotherhood members from the mother organisation after having lost hope that their organisation would be spared the ‘systematic security persecution’ that has been unabated since the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood from power on 3 July 2013, following 30 June nationwide demonstrations calling for President Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the group, to step down one year after having assumed his position.
On several Twitter and Facebook accounts, members of the Muslim Brotherhood who are now settling away from Egypt in several Arab, Middle Eastern and African states, lamented the development and blamed it fully on what they qualified as harsh oppression by the security forces in Egypt of its members, irrespective of the degree of their political activism or lack thereof.
‘It was coming round the corner for a few months,’ said a source close to the Brotherhood group. ‘There has been recently voices within the group suggesting that the Muslim Brotherhood is being treated from state and society as a terrorist group when it is not, and that if the members of the group know they are designated militant anyway, then they might as well pursue the militant path,’ he added.
The article goes on to make what we believe to be a highly salient point:
Researcher in the affairs of political Islamic groups Ahmed Ban concurs that the aggressive security approach, which has been targeting members of the Muslim Brotherhood, ‘has been only a catalyst for this recent wave of radicalisation.’
However, Ban insists that ‘it is only a catalyst and not the prime mover there — the prime locomotive for this transformation is the very base of the Muslim Brotherhood religious-political creed, that is not at all opposed to the accommodation of militant choices.’
‘In fact, this is the prime choice of the Muslim Brotherhood and it was only put aside when the group felt it was either too costly from the security perspective, or un-needed from the political perspective; but this is what they believe in anyway,’ Ban argued.
The GMBDW has noted that the behavior of the Egyptian government has often been used as the sole explanation for what appears to be the phenomenon of increasing violence stemming from part of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. We believe this is not a complete explanation as noted in the above passage.
Read the rest here.