From The Islamic Monthly
September 26, 2013
by Arsalan Iftikhar
Even though I had known about his work for some time, the first time I met Mouaz Moustafa in person was a few months ago in June 2013 at the Brookings Institution U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar. Only a few weeks earlier, Mr. Moustafa had successfully helped United States Senator John McCain (R-AZ) enter into Syria from Turkey to meet with members of Syrian resistance rebel forces.
As the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force- an American nonprofit that helped organize the McCain trip- Mouaz Moustafa played an integral role in bringing Senator McCain into Syria and he recently spoke to me about how he was able to successfully bring McCain into a civil war in one of the bloodiest hotspots in the Middle East today.
“In my work as executive director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force and Political Director for United for a Free Syria, I am regularly on Capitol Hill advocating on behalf of the Syrian People,” Mouaz Moustafa told me during an interview explaining the beginnings of his interactions with the Arizona Senator’s office. “Senator McCain has [always] been very involved in Middle East affairs and has stood by the Syrian People’s revolution and so we had met the Senator and his staff in the past to discuss US Policy and Syria.”
When it came to actually visiting Syria in the midst of a civil war, Moustafa made it quite clear that it “was Senator McCain’s decision to go to Syria” and that the Syrian Emergency Task Force was “honored to be given the responsibility of coordinating his meetings with commanders from the Free Syria Army in [both] Turkey and Syria.”
In terms of actually safely getting Senator McCain into Syria, he mentioned that the “route to Syria was in a car convoy from Gaziantep [in southeast Turkey] to the Killis boarder crossing and into Syrian territory.” According to Moustafa, all together there were three separate meetings with Senator McCain and rebel forces.
