Congress member reveals Qatar’s funding to 9/11 terrorists

CAIRO – 29 July 2017: A senior ranking member of U.S. Congress raised new questions on Wednesday about the relationship between Qatari institutions and well-known figures with senior leaders of al-Qaeda, Al-Nusrah Front in Syria, Hamas in Palestine and IS.

Qatar’s role in actively funding or failing to stop others sending money to banned groups should bring into question the continued major U.S. military presence in the country, said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa.

She added in a hearing session in the U.S. Congress that Qatar has three sources of terrorism funding including the Qatari government’s funding and Qatari citizens’ funding given to terrorist organizations under the auspices of the oil-rich state.

According to documents revealed in 2015 on terrorism funding, Qatari individuals and entities were transferring funds to extremist groups in the Arab region such as al-Nusrah Front, Ms Lehtinen added.

She stressed that Qatar should abandon the current foreign policy followed by its administration; otherwise the location of the U.S. Udeid airbase, currently in Doha, will be reconsidered by the American administration.

“Doha’s behavior must change the status quo, and if it does not, it risks losing our cooperation on the air base.”

She defined Qatar as only helping “to facilitate our operations at our airbase”, while “the UAE, for example, has spent 12 years fighting alongside us in Afghanistan”.

Qatar supplied Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, the mastermind of 9/11 terror acts, with financial assistance, Ms Lehtinen said.

The Republican congresswoman described Doha as “a permissive environment for terror financing” and said that it had “openly housed Hamas leaders, Taliban leaders, and has several individuals who have been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department and it has failed to prosecute them.”

She said she hoped the rift would end with the Gulf countries working closely with the U.S. Treasury Department “to root out and disrupt terror financing streams.”

She manifested that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have tried many times to persuade Qatar to stop its funding assistance to terrorist groups, noting that Qatar is a permissible environment for terrorism.