Israel Matzav

Hamas admits tensions with Assad regime

Hamas has denied twice that its leadership is leaving Syria for Qatar, but according to the New York Times the terror group now admits to 'tensions' with its Syrian hosts over Hamas' refusal to come out in favor of the Assad regime in its battle against rebels.

But Hamas officials acknowledged in a series of interviews that relations with Syrian officials have been tense.

“The Syrian government said to us, ‘Whoever is not with us is against us,’ ” said a senior Hamas official at a Palestinian camp near Damascus. “It wants us to express clearly our position over what is going on in Syria. It wants us to be against the Syrian demonstrations. We told them we are neutral. We said to them we are living in the country as visitors and we have no right to comment or interfere in the country’s problems.”

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Salah Bardawil, a Hamas official in Gaza, said Hamas “cannot support a party against another party in an Arab country,” adding, “The Syrian leadership and other leaderships should understand Hamas’s strategic principle not to intervene in the internal affairs of the states.”

Hamas considers itself a populist movement, and although it owes a great deal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, it does not wish to be associated with its current policies of suppression.

Asked about the report that Hamas would move to Qatar, Abu Izz, the Damascus bureau manager for Hamas’s leader, Khaled Meshal, said by telephone that it was false.

“There is nothing to this report in Al Hayat that we are going to Qatar,” he said. “It is absolutely not true.”

But Amr al-Azm, a Syrian historian at Shawnee State University in Ohio, who is in frequent touch with people in Damascus, said that the Hamas leadership was definitely examining its options, looking at other countries in which it might settle.

He said that in addition to wanting Hamas to condemn the popular uprising, the Syrian government was angry that it had not been consulted about the reconciliation pact Hamas agreed to sign with its rival, the Palestinian faction Fatah, in Cairo on Wednesday. But he added that, ultimately, the Syrian government would want to keep Hamas in Damascus, because its presence there was a major point of negotiation in the peace process.

“If Hamas moves out, then Syria loses that card,” Mr. Azm said. “The Assad regime might get annoyed with Hamas, but ultimately Hamas gives them a kind of legitimacy because it lets them say that they’re holding up the banner of resistance.”

Faster, faster.

Labels: Bashar al-Assad, Hamas, Syrian uprising

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:29 PM