UK brands 2 Brotherhood-affiliated groups ‘terrorist’

The British government has included Hasm and Lewa al-Thawra, two militant movements affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, to a list of terrorist organizations.

The decision was taken after London reviewed evidence of the involvement of the two movements in attacks on security personnel in Egypt.

Including the two groups in the list represents a major shift in British positions toward the Muslim Brotherhood that has turned the British capital into a stronghold for its international organization which is headed by senior Brotherhood figure, Ibrahim Munir.

Hasm and Lewa al-Tharwa members had repeatedly stressed their affiliations with the Brotherhood.

The UK had previously included ten international organizations, some of them from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in its list of terrorist entities.

The decision to include Hasm and Lewa al-Thawra in the list came two years after the office of former British Prime Minister David Cameron released the results of investigations into the suspected involvement of the Brotherhood in terrorist activities. Cameron declared the results of the investigations at a session of the British House of Commons.

The investigations had shown the presence of strong evidence that the ideology of the Brotherhood was a violent one. Nonetheless, a decision was not made to brand the Brotherhood as “terrorist” organization then.

When Theresa May came to the office of prime minister in Britain, the whole file was closed. It is highly likely, however, that the investigations into the Brotherhood’s involvement in violence will be revived.

In the past few months, Muslim Brotherhood figures living in European countries worked tooth and nail to deny links between their organization and the two militant groups.

The Brotherhood, the same figures claimed, does not have any militant groups affiliated to it. But this contradicts statements by the leaders of Hasm and Lewa al-Thawra themselves in which they said they were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Soon after carrying out an attack on policemen in Egypt a few months ago, one of the two groups declared that it was staged in retaliation for the liquidation of senior Brotherhood figure Mohamed Kamal earlier.

On April 8th this year, two pro-Brotherhood channels revealed that two men who were killed by policemen at a farm outside Cairo on involvement in terrorist activities were Brotherhood members.

In March this year as well, a Muslim Brotherhood branch commanded by Mohamed Kamal confessed that Hassan Mohamed Galal Mustafa who was wanted then by the authorities for being a member of Hasm was a member of the Brotherhood too.

International affairs experts, Said al-Lawendy, said the decision of the UK government to label Hasm and Lewa al-Thawra as “terrorist” groups would open the door wide for a change in British positions toward the Muslim Brotherhood movement as a whole.

The thing is, al-Lawendy said, these groups are affiliated to the Brotherhood which means that the decision of the UK government will pave the road for more decisive positions against the movement in the future.

He added in a press statement that the UK was the target of a number of terrorist attacks in the past. These attacks, he said, motivated the British government to include violent movements in the list of terrorist entities.

Al-Lawendy expected the Brotherhood to start an aggressive campaign to prove that it has nothing to do with these groups.

It will, however, fail in doing this because the members of these groups are members of the Brotherhood in the first place, he said.

Ahmed al-Enani, a member of think tank, Egyptian Center for Foreign Affairs, described the British decision as a “successful” one.

It is actually, he said, the first step by the British government to redress the mistakes it committed in the past when it believed that the Brotherhood was not a terrorist organization.

This is the beginning and the British government needs to ban the Brotherhood organization as a whole and label it as a “terrorist” organization, al-Enani said.