The head of Syria’s main opposition group resigned yesterday, weakening the moderate wing of the two-year revolt against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule and complicating Western efforts to back the rebels.
We are very sorry for this and I hope he reviews his resignation
The resignation of Moaz Alkhatib, a former imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus who had offered Assad a negotiated exit, could make the West more cautious in supporting the revolt. Alkhatib was seen as a moderate bulwark against the rising influence of al-Qaeda-linked jihadist forces.
Syrian opposition leaders are due to attend an Arab League summit this week, Qatar said earlier yesterday, looking for more support for their armed uprising.
Michael Stephens, researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in Doha, said Alkhatib’s resignation throws a spanner into the summit.
“The premise of the summit is to determine whether the opposition has a legitimate right to sit with Arab states.
“While Khatib may have blamed the EU summit, it is well known that the Arab League is meeting today, and his resignation will have a serious effect on the process,” Stephens said.
Alkhatib was picked to head the Western and Gulf-backed National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, which was formed in Qatar.
His resignation is seen as having been to some degree caused by Qatar, the main backer of his political foes in the coalition, and the country spearheading Arab support for the revolt as its geopolitical ramifications deepen.
The conflict pits Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority against Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam that has controlled the country for almost five decades, deepening the Sunni-Shi’ite divide in the Middle East and raising tension between Gulf states and Iran.
Asked to comment on Alkhatib’s resignation, Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said “We are very sorry for this and I hope he reviews his resignation.”
Alkhatib quit after the coalition berated him for offering Assad a deal and after the group went ahead, despite his objections, with steps to form a provisional government that would have further diminished his authority.
“I had promised the great Syrian people and promised God that I would resign if matters reached some red lines,” Alkhatib said in a statement on his official Facebook page, without explaining exactly what had prompted his move.
“Now I am fulfilling my promise and announcing my resignation from the National Coalition in order to be able to work with freedom that cannot be available within the official institutions,” he said.
Last week, the coalition chose Islamist-leaning technocrat Ghassan Hitto as a provisional Prime Minister to form a government to fill a power vacuum in Syria arising from the revolt that has killed more than 70,000 people.
Alkhatib, who had argued insufficient groundwork had been done to start forming a government, was weakened considerably, along with a moderate wing of the revolution as jihadist Salafists play a bigger role on the battlefield.