In recent comments to CNN, Qatar’s prime minister reflected on his country’s unique ability to “convene between conflicted parties and understand the grievances.”
Of course, Qatar’s ability to perform that job rests on a hefty rolodex of international contacts, including some of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups. At first glance, this wouldn’t strike the average reader as much of a problem. The United States doesn’t negotiate with terrorist groups, which means it must employ someone else to mediate. Why shouldn’t that someone be Qatar, a Major Non-NATO Ally in good standing with Washington?
The only problem is that Qatar has spent decades harboring, financing, or promoting many of the terrorist groups it engages. At best, the Qataris come to the negotiating table with biases. At worst, they’re doing the terrorists’ bidding.
Much ink has been spilled since October 7, 2023, about Qatar’s longstanding relationship with Hamas. The story, in a nutshell, begins in 1999 when Hamas was shopping for new headquarters after Jordan expelled the group from its territory. Qatar offered Hamas leaders sanctuary, but Hamas picked Syria instead. Still, Hamas maintained contact with Qatar throughout the first decade of the 21st century before eventually opening a political office in Doha in 2012.
The same year, Qatar solidified its financial relationship with Hamas when the former emir — the first foreign head of state to visit Gaza under Hamas rule — pledged $400 million to the impoverished enclave. By October 2023, that sum had soared to approximately $1.8 billion, plus millions more that Qatari leaders allegedly sent to Hamas via a “discreet” funding channel. American and Israeli intelligence officials past and present agree that Qatari cash enabled Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people in Israel.
Through it all, Qatar sheltered many of Hamas’s senior leaders — all of them amassing multi-billion-dollar fortunes from their havens in Doha, where they remained throughout the current war. Hamas’s late political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, received an honorable burial outside of Doha after his killing in July 2024. Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani mourned alongside Hamas chief Khalil al-Hayya and Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad Nakhalah at Haniyeh’s funeral, according to photographs in the press.
The sad truth is that Qatar isn’t only buddy-buddy with Hamas. American readers may be equally, if not more, concerned to learn that Qatar has history with Al Qaeda and the Taliban — groups responsible for the deaths of thousands of U.S. civilians and servicemen.
In the early 1990s, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), whom the 9/11 Commission Report identified as “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks,” moved to Qatar at the invitation of Qatar’s former minister of Islamic affairs. In Qatar, KSM took a job at the Qatari Ministry of Electricity and Water. While in his government post, KSM allegedly made a modest financial contribution to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and conspired to blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific Ocean. In 1996, KSM evaded U.S. authorities and escaped to Pakistan thanks to the intervention of Qatari officials, who reportedly alerted KSM of his impending arrest.
Qatar’s relationship with Al Qaeda extends beyond the group’s core operatives. As early as 2012, Qatar began welcoming leaders of the Nusra Front — Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria — for meetings in Doha “with senior Qatari military officials and financiers.” Qatar went on to fill Nusra’s coffers with multi-million-dollar ransom payments to free foreign hostages held in Syria.
In 2016, Nusra split from Al Qaeda and became Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The move was little more than a nominal rebrand, reportedly undertaken in accordance with Qatari advice. Qatar-owned Al Jazeera broadcast two interviews with HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani — known today as Ahmad al-Sharaa, president of Syria — during which al-Jolani gave a hat tip to Osama bin Laden.
As for the Taliban, the group established a foreign headquarters in Doha in 2013. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry thanked Qatar for its “willingness to host the Taliban office,” which he noted was intended “to facilitate negotiations between the Afghan High Peace Council and the authorized representatives of the Taliban.” That much may be true, but the office also allegedly functioned as a fundraising platform for the Taliban.
Throughout the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the Doha office provided a conduit for the negotiations that ultimately led to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. In the interim, Qatar leveraged its relationship with the Taliban to negotiate prisoner swaps, including the infamous 2014 deal that saw the U.S. release the “Taliban Five,” a group of senior Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, in exchange for U.S. deserter Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The Taliban Five resettled in Qatar, where at least three of them reportedly “tried to plug back into their old terror networks.”
Private terror finance is another challenge. Qatar has long served as an oasis for private funders of terror, and despite pledging in 2017 to crack down, little has changed. Less than two weeks after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned a Qatar-based financier who “was involved in the transfer of tens of millions of dollars to Hamas.” The Financial Action Task Force, an international money-laundering and terror finance watchdog, concluded in 2023 — the last year that it evaluated Qatar — that Doha was not “effectively identifying, investigating, or prosecuting terror finance cases.”
During his first term, President Donald Trump was clear-eyed about Qatar. In 2017, after a group of Gulf states imposed a blockade on Qatar over its support for terrorism, Trump noted that the Saudis had “said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing Qatar.” Trump has taken a decidedly different tone during his second term, basking on more than one occasion in Qatar’s friendship. When it comes to Qatar, it’s time to drop the blinders and get back to Trump 1.0.