122 Coming Out and Coming Together The FSA’s lack of coordination with the Syrian National Council also posed significant challenges in unifying the opposition. As Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami (2018: 57) argue, “The Syrian revolution wasn’t led by a vanguard party and wasn’t subject to centralised control. It didn’t splinter, because it was never a monolith.” Many other groups were coordinating resistance at the local and national levels, including the militarized Syrian Revolution General Commission, the Syrian Revolution Coordinators Union (Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami 2018), and the Supreme Council of the Syrian Revolution (O’Bagy 2012). Many defectors and civilians later allied themselves with the Free Syrian Army, but this force was comprised of multiple factions that lacked a central command structure. Various coordinating groups emerged inside and outside of Syria to represent the opposition, but these groups lacked a common vision and often contested each other’s tactics and legitimacy. As a result, Syrians came to share the demand that “the regime must go!” but lacked consensus over a prognostic frame of who should lead and represent this effort (Snow and Benford 1988). This lack of coordination and consensus in the home-country was reproduced in the opposition abroad. So just as the Syrian community was beginning to join together and publicly support the revolution, emergent prorevolution groups in the diaspora became redivided by conflict transmission. A major hurdle in sustaining cohesion among the anti-regime diaspora was the fact that leaders of pro-revolution groups and organizations were perceived as trying to co-opt the movement for their own gains. As Malik of the Syrian Justice and Development Party recalled, the London pro-revolution scene quickly succumbed to infighting and competition that was easily observable during street protests. The demonstrations caused a lot of problems within the community itself. The same problems, the same divisions that were happening in the Syrian opposition were reflected in this microcosm of the Syrian community in the UK. Because you had the professionals who were like – there was a guy and he wants to be basically the head of whatever revolutionary body that represents the Syrian community in the UK, even though he was very close with the ambassador until very recently, before the revolution. On account of the fact that he thinks he’s clever and he’s got a high position and he’s highly regarded in the community, he has to be the boss. And then the Muslim Brotherhood came along thinking oh, hold on a second. We’ve been doing this for years, this is our gig! So then they started muscling in. We tried to set up a protest coordination committee, but it kept falling apart because whenever there was a Muslim Brotherhood guy involved, they would say, oh, Muslim Brotherhood is hijacking this thing. It just became extremely messy. And basically, it got to a point where there isn’t really any organization in the UK that represents Syrians who are against the regime. And this is the challenge when it comes to organizing anything Syrian in the UK, because you have certain political forces that believe that they have an automatic right to assume leadership regardless of who created the body or whatever. One of those forces that was probably the most influential was Muslim Brotherhood. Making the situation more difficult was the fact that active members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood were (and are) a part of the opposition, but have https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press