Breakdown of Conflict Transmission 123 not been card-carrying members of an official organization with a brickand-mortar headquarters. This made it all the more confusing as to who was truly a Brotherhood member and who was not, which created mistrust and suspicion over activists’ underlying agendas. In addition, many interviewees who denied having a Muslim Brotherhood affiliation were nevertheless accused by others of being secret members working as a fifth column for a Brotherhood takeover. For instance, when the name of a widely known anti-regime figure in London was raised in an interview I was conducting with an independent activist, this respondent interjected, “He is Brotherhood, by the way.” When I replied that this person explicitly denied being affiliated in any way with the group, he said with a raised eyebrow, “Do you think he would actually tell you that he is?” suggesting that I had been easily deceived. In this way, I came to learn that the Brotherhood was used as a label to refer to actual members of the opposition-in-exile forced to leave Syria in the early 1980s, as well as current factions within Syria’s revolutionary movement perceived as working in the service of the transnational Brotherhood movement and on behalf of Islamist principles more generally. Activists also branded other dissidents as “Brotherhood” when they perceived them as co-opting the revolution on behalf of a conservative Sunni Muslim agenda, regardless of their actual intentions and identities. According to Conduit (2019: 167), Walid Saffour, the longtime Syrian activist in exile in London who represented the Syrian Human Rights Committee on the Syrian National Council, was later appointed as the Opposition Coalition’s ambassador to London. This gave “the Brotherhood an important formal diplomatic link to the UK through an undeclared member” (Conduit 2019). However, Conduit also reports that “a Brotherhood associate was highly critical of the decision, arguing that Saffour was unqualified for such an important diplomatic role and that the Brotherhood’s push to have one of their own represented amounted to ‘gross incompetence’ on the group’s part” (Conduit 2019). This criticism followed in line with the Brotherhood’s compromised reputation in Syria as being linked clandestinely to “front” groups that had not been open or honest about their ties to the Ikhwan (Conduit 2019: ch. 6). It also followed concerns among Syrians at home and in the diaspora that the Brotherhood was attempting to dominate the opposition. This mistrust exacerbated long-standing conflict transmission and factionalism in the community; as Ahmed of London lamented, “you always had this accusation against people, that they’re Muslim Brotherhood.” After joining a pro-revolution activist group in London, he found himself shunned as a result of this accusation. They identified me as being Muslim Brotherhood. I tell them I’m not and I haven’t got anything to do with them. I mean, my father was part of them but he left them when I was very young. He is very religious. I’m not as religious as he is, by the way. And well, they made it very clear that they didn’t like my presence with them. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press