Although Qatar keeps denying (Arabic link) its links to terrorist organizations in the Middle East, particularly ISIS, many factions in the Arab world and the West continue to believe Doha is funding Islamist groups across the region. Various Arab actors and media outlets emphasized this claim in the past days during the emir of Qatar’s visit to the UK.
Qatar is participating in the U.S.-led coalition to battle ISIS militants who have seized large parts of Iraq and Syria, and is denying providing any help to ISIS or any other terror organization. However, Saudi King Abdullah recently expressed doubts about Qatar’s declarations, Al-Arab (Arabic link) reported. The newspaper added:
“The Saudi leadership is still not convinced that Qatar halted funding terrorist groups in the region such as the A-Nusra Front.”
After the deadly terror attack in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula last week, Maj. Gen. Salim Nasr, a military expert, said (Arabic link) that Qatar is responsible for the financing of terror groups in the Sinai. Even a Turkish official admitted (Arabic link) this week that Qatar still helps ISIS.
Qatar’s support to radical Islamist groups intensified in 2009 after it broke its trade ties with Israel. The Emir then became the first Arab leader to visit Gaza under the Hamas administration, which seized control of the Strip in a bloody military coup. According to The Telegraph, Doha also actively supports some of the hardline Islamist groups in Libya. As fellow Sunni Muslims in Syria began to rise up against Assad, Qatar began sending tens of millions of dollars to Syrian rebels through intermediaries in Turkey, who used some of the funds to purchase weapons and other supplies.
It seems that Qatar’s strategy of backing Islamists — Hamas in the Palestinian territories, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and extremist opposition fighters in Syria — while offering itself as an ally to established regimes irritated certain actors in the region, especially Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. “They’re playing a double game,” said a senior official of a nearby Arab nation, who spoke to Al-Shafaf website on the condition of anonymity. “The Qataris are the consummate opportunists.”
Amid these accusations, the emir of Qatar Sheikh Bin Hamad Al-Thani visits UK this week. The emir will meet the queen and hold talks with British Prime Minister David Cameron. Cameron is expected to demand that Qatar cut off the flow of funding to terrorists.
In Qatar’s Rise and America’s Tortured Middle East Policy, published in the September 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Jonathan Spyer observed:
Ironically, Qatar’s relations with fellow Arab states have been far less cozy, even downright hostile. Qatar’s massive funding of terrorists and support of Islamic radicals seeking to destabilize neighboring Arab governments, has sharpened tensions in the region, highlighting the three way divide in today’s Middle East – moderate and Western-oriented Sunni Arab states, like Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Saudi, Bahrain, Kuwait and others; the Sunni extremists terrorist supporting states, Qatar and Turkey, who fund and promote forces like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas; and the dangerous and radical axis of Iran, Assad, and Hezbollah.
Similarly, in The Fruitful Game: How Qatar Uses Soccer to Polish Its Image, published in the October 2014 of The Tower Magazine, Ben Cohen wrote:
“Qatar is playing a double game,” Haras Rafiq, the outreach officer for the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank based in London, told me. “On the one hand, its rulers are promoting a positive image of the country by, for example, hosting the 2022 World Cup and sponsoring Barcelona. On the other hand, they’re supporting and harboring extremism and terrorism in the Middle East and around the world. They also operate what I would term ‘apartheid-like’ policies domestically—go there, and you’ll see shopping malls that are for Arabs only. I, as a Muslim of Pakistani descent, can’t go into those malls.”
[Photo: World Economic Forum / flickr]