There is no excuse for openly harbouring terrorists, US tells Qatar

Dubai: Qatar will lose US cooperation if it does not change its policy and stop its excuses and reckless behaviour resulting from past mistakes by previous Republican and Democrat administrations, a US Congresswoman has warned.

“There is no excuse for openly harbouring terrorists and supporting groups that seek to harm our allies,” Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, said.

“The excuse by Qatar that it is harbouring these nefarious actors because the US asked them to no longer stands up. Qatar should not be continuing this reckless policy due to past mistakes from previous Republican and Democrat administrations.

"We must not allow for our airbase to be used as a means to justify this sort of behaviour and our lack of a more appropriate response. Doha’s behaviour must change the status quo, and if it does not, it risks losing our cooperation on the airbase,” Ros-Lehtinen said as she made a statement at a subcommittee hearing entitled, “Assessing the US-Qatar Relationship” on Wednesday.

The Congresswoman said that Katherine Bauer, a former senior level official at the Treasury Department, stated this month at a think tank event that “Saudi Arabia and the UAE have sought for years to kind of galvanise Qatar’s action against the terrorist financiers that were operating and continue to operate in Qatar.”

“Qatar has been known to be a permissive environment for terror financing, reportedly funding US designated foreign terrorist organisations, such as Hamas, as well as several extremist groups operating in Syria,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

“In fact, Qatar has openly housed Hamas leaders, Taliban leaders, and has several individuals who have been sanctioned by the US Treasury Department and it has failed to prosecute them.

“At least one high-ranking Qatari official provided support to the mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks against our country, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad," she said.

Then of course, there is Khalifa Mohammad who is a US, EU and UN-designated international terrorist, for his role in financing Al Qaida and a 9/11 mastermind. In 2008, he was tried and convicted in absentia by Bahrain for his terrorist activity and arrested later that year by Qatar, only to be released by the Qataris six months later and then openly financed by Doha.

"Can anyone guess what Khalifa Mohammad has been up to these days? He was implicated in terror-financing activities in 2012, but more recently, he has been alleged to be financing and supporting terror in both Iraq and Syria, with no response from the Qatari government.”

Ros-Lehtinen said that many individuals and charities in Qatar have been known to raise large sums of money for Al Qaida, Al Nusra Front, Hamas and Daesh.

Three buckets

“In Qatar there are three buckets: Terror financing by the government, terror financing done in Qatar through their own citizens that the government may not know about, and terror financing in Qatar that the government knows about, but does nothing to stop,” she said.

In October 2016, Daniel Glaser, then Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing in the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, told a Washington, DC research institute that, over the past decade, Qatar had made less progress in countering terrorism financing than had Saudi Arabia, she said.

“We must analyse the totality of our relationships with these Gulf countries," she said.

"While Qatar only helps to facilitate our operations at our airbase, the UAE for example has spent 12 years with us fighting alongside in Afghanistan and has been involved in counter-terrorism operations with the US in Libya.

"So moving forward, one outcome that I hope comes out of this dispute is for the Gulf countries to work closely with our Treasury Department’s Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to root out and disrupt terror financing streams.

"This uneasy time may just be an opportunity for us to take a long hard look at how — and for some, if — we can effectively address and stop terror financing in the region and ultimately defeat the extremism that threatens the security of us all.”