CAIRO, Egypt – America is open to widening its contacts among opponents of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad following the setting up of an alliance between a former Syrian vice president and the country’s militant Muslim Brotherhood.

The leader of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni, met with and formed a pact with the former Syrian vice president, Abdul Halim Khaddam, at a little-noticed conference in Brussels on March 16 and 17. Mr. Khaddam last year began cooperating with the U.N. investigation into Syria’s role in the assassination of Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.

Last week the assistant secretary of state for near east affairs, David Welch, told Arab newspaper reporters that he was interested in what Mr. Khaddam has to say. Yesterday, a State Department spokesman, Gregg Sullivan, reiterated that view. “This political union is an internal Syrian political development. I would note that we are interested in hearing a wide array of views from Syrian opposition figures to gauge how we can best bring reform and democratization to Syria as well as a definitive change in Syrian behavior.”

While those words are hardly an endorsement of the new alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and the former vice president, they leave the door open to future contact with a coalition of opponents to the Assad regime that would include political parties in Syria that have historically been at odds with America.

Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood is best known for its terrorist acts against the Assad regime in the early 1980s. The wave of terror prompted the current Syrian president’s father, Hafez al-Assad to send his brother Rifaat al-Assad, to their stronghold in Hama, where his men slaughtered at least 20,000.

Mr. Khaddam would also be an unlikely American ally. In the spring of 2000, shortly after the ascendancy of Bashar al-Assad, he personally oversaw the arrests of Syrian intellectuals and liberals who had begun to take their first steps at criticizing the Baathist state.The American-based Reform Party of Syria accuses Mr. Khaddam of looting millions from the country.

The president of that party, Farid Ghadry, yesterday said he was deeply troubled by the development. “We want to start a new Syria and anyone who in the past has had a hand in corruption or killings must not be supported by the international community to resume their old habits in any government position,” he said. “We will ask Congress to help pass such a law to protect the Syrian people and their future.”

In remarks to the Saudi-owned Web site Efal, Mr. Ghadry was more specific, saying he would push for a clause in new legislation to aid the Syrian opposition that would make any parties that include members of the old regime implicated in corruption or crimes against the Syrian people, ineligible for such aid.

Mr. Ghadry’s party sent a delegation to Brussels last month to meet with Mr. Khaddam about his new plans for the opposition and was largely spurned. “We met with him to see what he could do for us.We did not go there to support him,” a member of the delegation, Abdul Latif Al-Monaeir, said yesterday. “He is a retaliatory person. I saw him in a closed vision. He did not want to open his mind. He closed the door, he established the meeting and gave the message: We don’t want to make the opposition open to anyone.”

Nonetheless, the new alliance, according to some analysts, represents a significant shift for an opposition that has been fractured and in hiding due to crackdowns by the Damascus regime.

“Khaddam and Bayanouni are probably the two strongest pillars of the opposition. Khaddam has discredited the regime by defecting and working with the U.N. investigation. And it is widely assumed that the Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood represents the strongest Sunni grassroots opposition inside Syria,” a research analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,Tony Badran, said yesterday.

However, Mr. Badran stressed that no good statistics or information exists on membership of the brotherhood or any political organization in Syria besides the Baath Party.

A Syrian author, Taher Ibrahim, last week in al-Sharq al-Araby described the alliance between Messrs. Khaddam and Bayanouni as “the alliance between the strongest of the weak on the Syrian scene, because there are no strong parties in the opposition.”