The Pentagon is ramping up intelligence-gathering in Libya as the Obama administration draws up plans to open a third front in the war against the Islamic State. This significant escalation is being planned without a meaningful debate in Congress about the merits and risks of a military campaign that is expected to include airstrikes and raids by elite American troops.
That is deeply troubling. A new military intervention in Libya would represent a significant progression of a war that could easily spread to other countries on the continent. It is being planned as the American military burrows more deeply into battlegrounds in Syria and Iraq, where American ground troops are being asked to play an increasingly hands-on role in the fight.
Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Friday that military officials were “looking to take decisive military action” against the Islamic State, or ISIS, in Libya, where Western officials estimate the terrorist group has roughly 3,000 fighters.
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Administration officials say the campaign in Libya could begin in a matter of weeks. They anticipate it would be conducted with the help of a handful of European allies, including Britain, France and Italy. The planning is unfolding amid political chaos in Libya, which continues to reel from the aftermath of the 2011 civil war that ended with the killing of the country’s longtime dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. In recent months the United Nations has struggled to persuade two groups of Libyan officials who claim to be the country’s rightful leaders to band together. On Monday, the parliament that is recognized by the international community rejected a unity government proposal brokered by the United Nations.
The political strife and infighting among rival militias created an opening for the Islamic State in Libya in 2014. The extremist group now controls the coastal city of Surt, which lies between the country’s two largest cities, Tripoli and Benghazi. General Dunford told reporters that striking the cells of Islamic State fighters in Libya would “put a firewall” between that front and sympathizers of the group elsewhere in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
That is a reasonable goal. But military officials have yet to make a persuasive case that it is achievable. Even if the Pentagon and its allies were to manage to strike Islamic State targets successfully, it remains uncertain that they would have a reliable ground force to hold the terrain. There’s good reason to believe that airstrikes would create the temptation to deploy ground troops to gather intelligence and provide technical support to rebel forces as they have in Iraq and Syria.
On the same day General Dunford discussed the plans for Libya, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said the Pentagon was redoubling efforts to assist local forces in Iraq and Syria. “We’re looking for opportunities to do more, and there will be boots on the ground — I want to be clear about that — but it’s a strategic question, whether you are enabling local forces to take and hold, rather than trying to substitute for them,” he told CNBC in an interview.
There seems to be little interest in Congress to authorize the campaign against the Islamic State, which is predicated, preposterously, on the 2001 law passed to take action against the culprits of the Sept. 11 attacks. The prospect of a new front in the war should spur lawmakers to revisit the issue.
The White House has said it would be nice, but not necessary, for Congress to pass a new authorization for the use of military force. That stance has allowed Congress — which has primary responsibility under the Constitution to declare war — to sidestep an important war vote.
A recent column by David Ignatius contains an important insight about how different countries perceive their roles in countering the extremist group known as ISIS. Ignatius observed a table-top war game at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies. The game scenario involved ISIS seizing control of a province in southern Syria and conducting cross-border attacks that inflict casualties on the armed forces of both Israel and Jordan. The teams playing the roles of the Israeli and Jordanian governments both acted with restraint, hoping not to be drawn deeply into the Syrian war. The Israeli team retaliated for ISIS killing its soldiers but did not initiate any major military operations. The Jordanian team was looking for the Syrian regime and its Russian backer to use force to eject ISIS from its new position in southern Syria.
The Israeli team was led by a retired general who previously headed the planning staff of the Israel Defense Forces. Ignatius confirmed with a later visit to Israeli military headquarters that the game accurately reflected how Israel's actual military leaders currently view the war in Syria. He cites a senior Israeli military official as saying that if Israel wanted to launch a major ground offensive against ISIS forces in southern Syria (as well as ISIS-connected militants in the Sinai Peninsula), it could wipe out the ISIS forces in three or four hours. “But,” the official continued, “what would happen the day after? Right now, we think it will be worse.” That is a terse but correct statement of the key question and main problem involved in any ideas at the present time about escalating the use of force in an effort to destroy ISIS.
When it comes to how most Israeli officials talk about the U.S. role, however, they say something different. According to Ignatius, “They argue that the United States is a superpower, and that if it wants to maintain leadership in the region, it must lead the fight to roll back the Islamic State.”
That's not leadership; it would be, among other things, a free rider problem.
It's not just the Israelis and Jordanians who are thinking along such lines. Although U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter says, “I have personally reached out to the ministers of defense in over forty countries around the world to ask them to contribute to enhancing the fight against ISIL,” the New York Timesreports that “the United States has had little success in persuading allies to provide more troops.”
It is quite rational and unsurprising for other countries to behave as they have on this issue, both because of the long-term prospects for ineffectiveness that the Israeli official noted and as a matter of burden-shifting. As Ignatius puts it, “Most players still want to hold America's coat while the United States does the bulk of the fighting.” It may be in the interest of those players for the roles to be apportioned that way; it certainly is not in the interests of the United States for the roles to be apportioned that way. And the question about what happens the day after applies to the United States as it would to Israel or any other party that might intervene.
All of this is related to warped but nonetheless commonly expressed views within the United States about what constitutes U.S. leadership abroad, in the Middle East or anywhere else. Too often what is labeled as leadership is really more like followership, in that it gets measured in terms of what other, coat-holding governments would like the United States to do. Also too often, leadership is equated with sounding bellicose or doing tough-looking, kinetic things such as escalating the use of military force.
The warped views of U.S. global leadership do not correspond to what generally is understood to constitute leadership in other contexts, such as a corporation or other organization. In those places, for the boss to do everything himself or herself is not seen as leadership but rather as a sign of inability to exercise leadership. True leadership instead involves persuading everybody in an enterprise that they are part of a common effort with important goals, and motivating them to work together to do their parts of the job. Maybe Secretary Carter is not demonstrating effective leadership in his failure to get other countries to contribute more in fighting ISIS, or maybe the interests of those countries just make it difficult for even the most skillful leader to make much headway on that front. But it should not be a matter of the United States doing it all. Sometimes a leader does have to get ahead of what other players are doing, but as a way of pointing them in the right direction and inspiring them to act as well, not as an alternative to their acting.
Underlying all of this as far as the ISIS problem is concerned is the question of whom the group most threatens. As measured by generation of refugees, destabilization of one's region, and potential for direct physical harm, the United States has less reason to feel threatened than do many other countries, including the coat-holders.
Let’s say Islamic State fighters attack an Israeli military patrol along the Syrian border. They try unsuccessfully to kidnap an Israeli soldier, and they kill four others. A Jordanian border post is hit, too, and the Islamic State proclaims it has control of Daraa province in southern Syria.
This simulation exercise was run by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) as part of its annual conference. The outcome illustrated the paradoxical reality of the conflict against the Islamic State: Israel and Jordan act with caution and restraint, hoping to avoid being drawn deeper into the chaotic Syrian war, even as the United States escalates its involvement.How do Israel and other key players respond? In a war game played here last week, they retaliated, but cautiously. The players representing Israel and Jordan wanted to avoid a pitched battle against the terrorists — they looked to the United States for leadership.
“We all believe that keeping Israel out of the conflict is important,” said Brig. Gen. Assaf Orion, a retired officer who served as head of the Israel Defense Forces’ planning staff. He led the Israeli team in the simulation. In the war game, Israel retaliated for the killing of its soldiers but avoided major military operations.
Jordan, too, wanted to avoid escalation. The players representing Jordan didn’t want to send their own troops into Syria. They worried about refugees and terrorist sleeper cells inside Jordan. They hoped that the combined military power of Russia and the Syrian regime could suppress the conflict and evict the Islamic State from its foothold in southern Syria. They looked for U.S. leadership but weren’t sure it was dependable.
Which left the United States. Gen. John Allen, the retired Marine who until recently coordinated the U.S.-led coalition’s strategy against the Islamic State, played the American hand. The United States viewed Israeli and Jordanian security as a vital national interest, he said, and would send its warplanes to retaliate for any attacks on its allies. U.S. military involvement, in the simulation and in reality, is increasing — partly by default of others.
If you don’t like this simulated version of the war, you may like real life even less. There’s growing consensus that the Islamic State poses a severe threat to regional and even international order; one senior former Israeli official described the conflict with the caliphate as “World War III.” But most players still want to hold America’s coat while the United States does the bulk of the fighting.
A visit to Israeli military headquarters here confirmed that the war game was an accurate reflection of how Israeli military leaders see the conflict. Rather than attacking Islamic State forces along its northern and eastern borders, Israel pursues a policy of deterrence, containment and even quiet liaison, said a senior Israeli military official. He noted that if Israel wanted to mount an all-out ground attack on Islamic State forces in southern Syria and the Sinai Peninsula, it could wipe them out in three or four hours. “But what would happen the day after?” asked this Israeli military official. “Right now, we think it will be worse. So we try to deter them.”
The Israelis don’t want to disturb a hornet’s nest in taking on the Islamic State. Is a similarly measured option available to the United States? Most Israeli officials say no. They argue that the United States is a superpower, and that if it wants to maintain leadership in the region, it must lead the fight to roll back the Islamic State.
The theme of the INSS conference was that the rules of the game are changing in the Middle East. States are fragmenting; a self-proclaimed caliphate has taken deep roots in Syria and Iraq and now has a presence in many more countries around the world; a rising, still-revolutionary Iran is using proxy forces to destabilize nearly every Arab state; the old order embodied by the secular dynasties of the Mubaraks, Assads and Gadd afis is shattered.
Israelis disagree among themselves about nearly every political topic, but on the strategic picture, there is basic agreement: As the state system splinters in the Middle East, the instability in this region will be chronic, and it will persist for many years. Escaping this conflict will be impossible. So think carefully how you want to fight a war in what the senior Israeli military official called “the center of a centrifuge.”
When it comes to fighting terror, America’s leaders have offered nothing but wildly unrealistic strategies destined to fail. And Obama's plan to defeat the Islamic State is no different.
Two weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel attempted to clarify the United States' military objectives against the militant organization the Islamic State (IS). He noted: "We will do everything possible that we can do to destroy their capacity to inflict harm on our people and Western values and our interests."
That expansive and unachievable aspiration was limited slightly last week when, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, U.S. President Barack Obama announced: "Our objective is clear: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL." Then, on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough significantly re-raised the bar of the ultimate objective when he stated: "Success looks like an ISIL that no longer threatens our friends in the region, no longer threatens the United States. An ISIL that can't accumulate followers, or threaten Muslims in Syria, Iran, Iraq, or otherwise." This suggests that some degree of confusion within the administration remains.
I recently wrote about the U.S. predilection for mission creep in military interventions. The companion to, and enabling factor for, mission creep is end state confusion and delusion. The military definesan end state as: "The set of required conditions that defines achievement of the commander's objectives." This broadly expressed vision presented by the president and senior officials should be clearly defined to ensure a unity of effort among the relevant government agencies in order to promote a synchronization of efforts and to clarify the risks associated with the campaign. Without a reasonable vision for what a strategy is supposed to achieve, it is almost certain to fail.
Sadly, if one behavior characterizes America's post-9/11 counterterrorism strategies, it is political leaders presenting totally unrealistic and implausible end states. Most troubling of all, even after a president states such goals, and it is not achieved, there has been no accountability for their failures. Moreover, there is little skepticism among policymakers or the media when the subsequent unobtainable end state is announced, the latest being Obama's objective to "ultimately destroy ISIL." And speaking at CENTCOM on Wednesday, Obama emphasized that "we mean what we say" when it comes to destroying or defeating terrorism, but when it comes to threats like IS the evidence suggests the opposite is true. When confronting threats like IS,however,rather than being honest and pragmatic about countering the threat of terrorism, political leaders have been misleading and maximalist.
Let's start with the initial military enemy in the global war on terrorism -- the Taliban. On Oct. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush offered the leadership of the Afghan government a "second chance" -- a dealwhereby the U.S. military offensive in Kabul would be halted if they surrendered Osama bin Laden. The Taliban refused, and although itoffered to turn bin Laden over to a third country, Bush rejected the counteroffer and the Taliban were toppled in December 2001. However, they soon reconstituted themselves around their historical strongholds in southern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Nevertheless, starting in the fall of 2002, Bush claimedrepeatedly that: "The Taliban's ability to brutalize the Afghan people and to harbor and support terrorists has been virtually eliminated." By September 2005, Bush felt comfortable declaring: "As a result of the United States military, Taliban no longer is in existence. And the people of Afghanistan are now free." This assertion was demonstrably false when Bush first stated it, and is even further from the truth today. The Taliban's numbers are estimated to be between 20,000 and 60,000, comprised of members of varying commitment, and its leaders remain safely in Quetta, Pakistan. According to journalist Dexter Filkins, the Taliban has also established parallel government and judicial structures, or "shadow governments," in all 34 Afghan provinces except for Kabul.
For the past ten years, according to the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database, the Taliban has also been the single greatest perpetrator of terrorism. In 2013, it was responsible for the most terrorist attacks around the world (641), which killed the most people (2,340), according to State Department. (In second place was IS itself, with 401 attacks that killed 1,725 people.) The Pentagon's latest bi-annual Afghanistan progress report highlights the Taliban's unpopularity and casualty rate, and how they are "unable to turn limited tactical successes into strategic or operational gains." But minimizing the Taliban's reach within Afghanistan was never America's stated objective -- it was the outright defeat of the movement. And, in no way, has the Taliban been defeated, nor is its defeat imminent.
What about the terrorist organization directly responsible for conducting 9/11? In its national counterterrorism strategies, the Bush administration provided that its ultimate objective was "to disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations of global reach"(2002), and "defeat global terrorism" (2006).
As Bushannounced in September 2006: "We will defeat the Taliban, we will defeat al Qaeda."
As Bush announced in September 2006: "We will defeat the Taliban, we will defeat al Qaeda." The Obama administration has adhered to this comprehensive end state. In June 2011, the White House released its own National Strategy for Counterterrorism, which stated in its first paragraph a top national security priorities of "disrupting, dismantling, and eventually defeating al-Qa'ida (sic) and its affiliates and adherents." In April 2012, then-White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennandeclared: "We're not going to rest until al Qaeda the organization is destroyed and is eliminated from areas in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Africa and other areas. We're determined to do that."
By the U.S. government's own data, these strategic objectives have all failed, despite lots of airstrikes and sustained support for local security forces. Of the four al Qaeda-affiliated groups for which the State Department has provided estimates of strength over the past five years, the only one to decrease in strength was al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. All others are estimated to still have the same number of fighters as they did in 2009.
Given that two administrations have failed to achieve their end states of defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations, we should be extremely doubtful of the Obama administration's strategic objective of destroying IS or its ability to threaten the United States or any of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. Furthermore, it is difficult to ascertain what the Obama administration has learned from the total failure to eliminate the Taliban and al Qaeda and all affiliates. Based upon White House statements, it appears that its sole lesson from the post-9/11 era is to avoid massive ground invasions, and to emulate the policies from Yemen and Somalia, which again, according to U.S. government data, have not worked.
On Friday, Pentagon spokesperson Rear Admiral John Kirby was asked how IS would be destroyed, beyond airstrikes and supporting partners on the ground. He replied: "It also is going to take the ultimate destruction of their ideology." If this is truly the ultimate pathway for IS's destruction, then it was strange that it did not appear anywhere in President Obama's strategy speech. Furthermore, altering the interpretation that others hold of a religious ideology is something that governments are really bad at. Indeed, this has to be the least successful U.S. counterterrorism line of effort over the past 13 years. In nearly every major policy speech or oversight hearing, Bush and Obama officials have repeatedly emphasized their belief of what Islam really is (peaceful and compassionate), and what it is not (violent and oppressive).
It is unclear who their attempts to discredit extremist Islam are intended to reach, but they have not succeeded in minimizingthe appeal that the ideology holds for domestic and foreign jihadist fighters. Within the Muslim world, the views of al Qaeda are extremelyunfavorable, and concerns about Islamic extremism have grown over the past tenyears. Yet, the number of individuals willing to fight and die on behalf of that ideology has not subsequently diminished. Seth Jones at the RAND Corporation recently found that over the past four years there was a 60 percent increase in the number of radical Islamic groups while the number of extremist fighters more than doubled. This suggests that if ideology is the "center of gravity" as the Pentagon spokesperson contended, then the United States will never be able to destroy it, nor IS itself.
In my totally idiosyncratic (and informal) survey of U.S. government employees and military officers over the past two weeks, I have not communicated with one person who thinks that IS will be "destroyed," using the military definition: "A condition of a target so damaged that it can neither function as intended nor be restored to a usable condition." The overwhelming response has been one of eye rolling, followed bya sympathetic "well, he had to say that." Moreover, most Americans feel the same way. According to a recent Wall Street Journalsurvey, 68 percent of the American people do not have confidence that the United States will achieve the goals outlined in Obama's speech, even while 71 percent support airstrikes in Iraq, and 65 percent support them in Syria. Therefore, the United States is eagerly and collectively marching towards a destination that it knows it will never reach.
Why did Obama claim that the United States can destroy a militant army of 10,000 to 30,000 members, when few people in or out of government believe that this aspirational end state can be achieved? Obviously, it is a simpler message that sounds super tough. Like his predecessor, Obama chose to articulate a wildly unachievable end state, rather than show the political courage to say the truth: the United States will attempt to diminish the threat that IS poses to U.S. personnel in the region to the greatest extent possible based upon the political will and resources that the United States and countries in the region are willing to commit. The only thing to be certain of when IS is not destroyed is that nobody will be held accountable, and another terrorist enemy will be put on the destruction list.
CAIRO — Standing at the front of a conference hall in Doha, the visiting sheikh told his audience of wealthy Qataris that to help the battered residents of Syria, they should not bother with donations to humanitarian programs or the Western-backed Free Syrian Army.
“Give your money to the ones who will spend it on jihad, not aid,” implored the sheikh, Hajaj al-Ajmi, recently identified by the United States government as a fund-raiser for Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.
Qatar is a tiny, petroleum-rich Persian Gulf monarchy where the United States has its largest military base in the Middle East. But for years it has tacitly consented to open fund-raising by Sheikh Ajmi and others like him. After his pitch, which he recorded in 2012 and which still circulates on the Internet, a sportscaster from the government-owned network, Al Jazeera, lauded him. “Sheikh Ajmi knows best” about helping Syrians, the sportscaster, Mohamed Sadoun El-Kawary, declared from the same stage.
Sheikh Ajmi’s career as fund-raiser is one example of how Qatar has for many years helped support a spectrum of Islamist groups around the region by providing safe haven, diplomatic mediation, financial aid and, in certain instances, weapons.
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Sheikh Ajmi and at least a half-dozen others identified by the United States as private fund-raisers for Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise operate freely in Doha, often speaking at state-owned mosques and even occasionally appearing on Al Jazeera. The state itself has provided at least some form of assistance — whether sanctuary, media, money or weapons — to the Taliban of Afghanistan, Hamas of Gaza, rebels from Syria, militias in Libya and allies of the Muslim Brotherhood across the region.
Now, however, Qatar is finding itself under withering attack by an unlikely alignment of interests, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel, which have all sought to portray it as a godfather to terrorists everywhere. Some in Washington have accused it of directly supporting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — an extremist group so bloodthirsty that Al Qaeda has condemned it — a charge that Western officials, independent analysts and Arab diplomats critical of Qatar all call implausible and unsubstantiated.
“That is just disinformation,” said Michael Stephens, a researcher based in Doha for the Royal United Services Institute, a British research center. “I am not going to excuse what Qatar has done: It has been grossly irresponsible when it comes to the Syrian conflict, like many other countries,” he said. “But to say that Qatar is behind ISIS is just rhetoric; it is politics getting in the way of things, and it blinds people to real solutions.”
Propelling the barrage of accusations against Qatar is a regional contest for power in which competing Persian Gulf monarchies have backed opposing proxies in contested places like Gaza, Libya and especially Egypt. In Egypt, Qatar and its Al Jazeera network backed the former government led by politicians of the Muslim Brotherhood. Other gulf monarchies long despised the Brotherhood because they saw it as a well-organized force that could threaten their power at home, and they backed the military takeover that removed the Islamist president.
Qatar is hardly the only gulf monarchy to allow open fund-raising by sheikhs that the United States government has linked to Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, the Nusra Front: Sheikh Ajmi and most of the others are based in Kuwait and readily tap donors in Saudi Arabia, sometimes even making their pitches on Saudi- and Kuwaiti-owned television networks. United States Treasury officials have singled out both Qatar and Kuwait as “permissive jurisdictions” for terrorist fund-raising.
In many cases, several analysts said, Qatar has sought to balance a wager on the future of political Islam as a force in the region with a simultaneous desire not to alienate the West. It has turned a blind eye to private fund-raising for Qaeda-linked groups to buy weapons in Syria, for example, but it has not provided direct government funding or weapons. At times, Mr. Stephens and other analysts said, Western pressure has moved Qatar to at least partly suppress some of the overt fund-raising.
Qatar openly provides a base for leaders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas — deemed a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel — as well as money to help prop up its government in Gaza. But American and Israeli officials say Qatar has stopped short of providing the group with weapons, as Iran does.
Qatar has allowed members of the Taliban to open an office and make their homes in Doha, but as part of deals approved by Washington.
In Libya, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are now backing rival sides in Libya’s escalating domestic unrest, each with unsavory ties: The U.A.E. is backing former fighters for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and members of his ruling elite, while Qatar is backing a coalition that includes militant Islamist groups.
During the 2011 uprising in Libya, Qatar supported an Islamist militia in Benghazi known as Rafallah al-Sehati that had relatively Western-friendly leaders but extremists in its ranks. The extremists later broke away to form Ansar al-Shariah, the militant group that played a role in the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens.
Now Qatar is still backing militias at least loosely allied with the group in their fight against an anti-Islamist faction backed by the United Arab Emirates.
But Qatar has also tried to draw lines, according to Western diplomats and Islamists who have worked with Doha. Since the military ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood’s government in Egypt, for example, Islamists in exile say that Qatar has given them sanctuary but has pointedly refused to provide money to the Brotherhood for fear of further alienating its gulf neighbors who backed the takeover.
“They try to calibrate,” said one Brotherhood leader, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid alienating the Qataris.
Many analysts say it is Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood that has drawn accusations from other gulf states that have charged that Qatar is funding terrorism in Syria and elsewhere.
“The big falling-out is over Egypt, not Syria,” said Paul Salem, a scholar at the Middle East Institute. Now, he said, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the other gulf states “are putting the squeeze on Qatar.”
Since the military takeover in Cairo, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have all withdrawn their ambassadors from Doha. And Israel, which once praised Qatar as the only gulf state to open bilateral relations, appears to be capitalizing on the split to pressure Qatar over its support for Hamas. Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, recently called Doha “Club Med for terrorists” in an opinion article in The New York Times.
The United Arab Emirates have retained an American consulting firm, Camstoll Group, staffed by several former United States Treasury Department officials. Its public disclosure forms, filed as a registered foreign agent, showed a pattern of conversations with journalists who subsequently wrote articles critical of Qatar’s role in terrorist fund-raising.
“All the gulf intelligence agencies are competing in Syria and everyone is trying to get the lion’s share of the Syrian revolution,” Sheikh Shafi al-Ajmi, also recently identified by the United States as a fund-raiser for Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, said in an interview on the Saudi-owned Rotana television network last summer.
He openly acknowledged his role buying weapons from the Western-backed military councils, who sometimes received arms from Qatar. “When the military councils sell the weapons they receive, guess who buys them? It’s me,” he said.
He defended the Nusra Front despite its ties to Al Qaeda. “We should not stop supplying them with weapons, because they are still fighting Assad,” he said. And he shared a joke with the host about Kuwait’s well-known role as the hub for Syrian rebel fund-raising. (Both Shafi al-Ajmi and Hajaj al-Ajmi are Kuwaitis; lawyers for both have said they raise money only for legitimate Syrian causes.)
Qatar says it opposes all “extremist groups,” including ISIS. “We are repelled by their views, their violent methods and their ambitions,” Khalid al-Attiyah, the Qatari foreign minister, said in a recent statement about the allegations.
In early 2013, when the West stepped up pressure on Persian Gulf states to crack down on Qaeda-linked fund-raisers, some complained that Qatar was turning against them. Other sheikhs “were welcomed as heroes at a conference in Doha and given lots of gifts, all to cut the support for the Nusra Front and to support the military councils, the pagan coalition,” Hamid Hamad Hamid Al-Ali, another Kuwaiti-born preacher designated last month as a terrorist fund-raiser, protested in an Internet posting in March 2013.
But social media posts and television appearances show that at least a half-dozen United States-designated terrorist fund-raisers, some designated years earlier, continued to frequent Doha.
In 2010, an arm of the Qatari government made a donation to help build a $1.2 million mosque in Yemen for a sheikh, Abdel Wahab al-Humayqani, designated as a fund-raiser for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. (Qatari Embassy officials and Yemeni government officials both attended the opening.)
In 2011, Harith al-Dari, an Iraqi sheikh and tribal leader designated as a terrorist fund-raiser in 2008, appeared on Al Jazeera praying at the opening of a state-owned mosque in Doha just steps from the crown prince of Qatar.
“Arab countries won’t let us in to discuss things with them and complain to them — except one or two,” Sheikh Dari said in a television interview in January. He spoke on Al Jazeera from Qatar, which was evidently among the “one or two.”
