Dubai: Qatar has always denied it paid funds to terrorist organisations as part of the deal to release 28 Qataris kidnapped in Iraq in 2015. But messages leaked recently suggest this is not the case.
On December 16, 2015, Qatar’s ruling family learnt that 28 members of a royal hunting party had been kidnapped in Iraq. The BBC reported that when Shaikh Mohammad Bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani, who was about to become Qatar’s foreign minister, got the list of hostages, he realised that it included two of his own relatives.
“Jasem is my cousin and Khalid is my aunt’s husband,” he texted to Qatar’s ambassador to Iraq, Zayed Al Khayareen. “May God protect you: once you receive any news, update me immediately.”
The two men would spend the next 16 months consumed by the hostage crisis. The BBC has obtained electronic documents that detail the “tortuous story of the negotiations, line by line, in texts and voicemails sent between the (Qatari) foreign minister and the ambassador”.
According to the BBC, in one version of events, they would pay more than a billion dollars to free the men. Qatar had entered secret talks to free its citizens, yet the bargaining had turned into a kind of group shakedown, with half a dozen militias and foreign governments jostling to squeeze cash from Doha.
The money would go to groups and individuals labelled “terrorists” by the US, including Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, which killed American troops with roadside bombs; General Qassem Sulaimani, leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force and personally subject to US and EU sanctions; and Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, once known as Al Nusra Front.
In one voicemail, Al Khayareen tells a Kataib Hezbollah leader: “You should trust Qatar, you know what Qatar did, what His Highness the Emir’s father did ... He did many things, this and that, and paid 50 million, and provided infrastructure for the south, and he was the first one who visited.”
The last mention in the exchanges of a $1-billion ransom is in January 2017, along with another figure — $150 million, presumably in kickbacks for middlemen. The hostage crisis was brought to an end in April 2017.
