A Heretical Release!

A press release issued by the Reform Party of Syria on October 18, 2006 claims that Ammar Abdulhamid, a Nonresident Fellow at Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, will be opening an office in Washington DC on behalf of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and/or the National Salvation Front (NSF). This is false.

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 NSF in Washington DC. Mr. Abdulhamid is a founding liberal member of the NSF, a broad-based pragmatic coalition of Syrian opposition groups and independent liberal activists.

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Nonresident Fellow at Saban Center for Middle East Policy, where he provides analysis and commentary on Syrian politics, Arab democratization, and US-Syrian relations. He previously served as a Visiting Fellow in the Saban Center, during 2004 and then from September 2005 to March 2006.

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.

Saban Center for Middle East Policy
The Brookings Institution