The recent meeting between a delegation of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders and the U.S. State Department has sparked controversy and raised concerns over a possible connection to Thursday's deadly attack in North Sinai. The U.S. State Department hosted a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood leaders, including Waleed Sharaby, Gamal Heshmat and Abdel Mawgoud al-Dardery for talks over their opposition to the current regime of President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. On Tuesday, just days after the meeting the Brotherhood released a statement calling on its supporters to prepare for ‘jihad.' Two days later, a series of attacks targeting army bases in Arish, North Sinai, left at least 25 dead and 36 injured. The meeting has caused widespread controversy, as it faced strong criticism from American journalists and researchers. "The fact that the Brotherhood issued its call to ‘jihad' two days after its meeting at the State Department will be grist for endless anti-American conspiracy theories about a supposed partnership between Washington and the Brotherhood," said Eric Trager, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). "The State Department should have foreseen what an embarrassment this would be," he added. A State Department official told the Washington Free Beacon, "We meet with representatives from across the political spectrum in Egypt", in response to accusations of supporting the outlawed MB. Terrorism and national security expert, Patrick Poole, described the meeting as "a direct insult to our Egyptian allies, who are in an existential struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood, all in the pursuit of the mythical ‘moderate Islamists' who the D.C. foreign policy elite still believe will bring democracy to the Middle East. "What this shows is that the widespread rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East, particularly the largest protests in recorded human history in Egypt on June 30, 2013, which led to Morsi's ouster, is not recognised by the State Department and the Obama administration," he added.
