The 'Club Med for terrorists'

As Britain joins another war in Iraq, Alastair Campbell, the now slightly-underemployed PR champion of the last one, has an exciting new job.

Campbell and his son, Rory, have started writing for a new football blog, The Pressing Game, which calls itself “truly independent” but spends rather a lot of its time attacking critics of Qatar’s controversial World Cup bid.

Alas, as Channel 4 News discovered on Friday, The Pressing Game is in fact a front secretly set up by lobbyists working for the Qatari government. It’s not the first time that the tiny Gulf kingdom has been linked to such a lack of transparency.

In a rather more important example last week, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, gave his first interview since succeeding to the throne last year. “We don’t fund extremists,” he told CNN.

“If you talk about certain movements, especially in Syria and Iraq, we all consider them terrorist movements.”

Qatar, home to a major US airbase, has joined the military coalition against Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

The truth, however, is that we might never have needed a war in the first place without the substantial funding Isil has received from individuals in Qatar.

For Britain, “Jihadi John”, the man with a London accent heard in three hostage murder videos, has become the masked face of Isil, the first time the group’s true threat has been brought home.

Last week, even as the Emir of Qatar protested his country’s innocence of the funding of Isil, the US Treasury produced the first evidence that Qatari money helped Jihadi John, or other Britons like him, reach Syria.

It designated as a terrorist a man called Tariq al-Harzi, describing him as Isil’s “emir for the border region between Syria and Turkey, tasked by Isil with receiving new foreign fighter recruits and providing them with light weapons training before sending them to Syria”.

Specifically, the US said, he “assisted foreign fighters from the UK”.

Last September, according to the US Treasury, Tariq al-Harzi “arranged for Isil to receive approximately $2 million (£1.25 million) from a Qatar-based Isil financial facilitator, who required that al-Harzi use the funds for military operations only. The Qatar-based financial facilitator also enlisted al-Harzi’s assistance with fundraising efforts in Qatar.”

Qatar may say that this was the work of private individuals, not the government. But any state, especially a Gulf autocracy, can stop this sort of thing if it wants to badly enough.

According to the US State Department’s latest country report on terrorism, though, Qatar’s monitoring of local contributions to foreign organisations is “inconsistent”. It does have money-laundering and terrorist financing laws, but their enforcement and implementation is “lacking” and marked by “significant gaps”.

Besides, the evidence for the Qatari government’s own links with extremists – some of whom raised money that ended up with Isil – is irrefutable. “There are eight to 12 key figures in Qatar raising millions of pounds for the jihadis,” said one Western local diplomat. “There’s not even much attempt to keep quiet about it.”

Most of the eight to 12, it should be said, raised their money for Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria. The money flow was at its busiest last year, when al-Nusra and Isil were officially merged, with fighters and equipment passing from one to the other. But there were disputes, and early this year they officially split. Some of the Qatari money and the Qatari-funded weaponry sent to al-Nusra between about April last year and February will now be in the hands of Isil.

Last December, the US government designated a man called Abd al-Rahman bin Umayr al-Nuaymi as a terrorist. Officials said Nuaymi had “ordered the transfer of nearly $600,000 (£370,000) to al-Qaeda via al-Qaeda’s representative in Syria”.

Nuaymi is – or was until recently – an adviser to the Qatari government and a founding member of a major charity linked to the royal family, the Sheik Eid bin Mohammed al-Thani Charitable Foundation.

The US also designated a man called Abd al-Wahhab al-Humayqani as a terrorist. Humayqani served as a mufti and legal scholar at the Qatari Ministry of Endowment and Islamic Affairs.

As long ago as 2006, a man called Hamid Abdullah al-Ali was designated by the United States as a “terrorist facilitator who has provided financial support for al-Qaeda-affiliated groups”, who “recruits jihadists” and has provided “financial support for recruits”.

On his website, Ali offered technical advice on how to make explosives and chemical and biological weapons. He has issued fatwas legitimising suicide bombing, including one describing the “permissiveness, and sometimes necessity, of suicide operations on the condition of crushing the enemy… in modern times, this can be accomplished by bringing down an aeroplane on an important site that causes the enemy great casualties”.

For the past two years, his Twitter feed has glorified al-Nusra – or the “heroes” as he calls them.

On March 2 2012, at the invitation of the Ministry of Endowment and Islamic Affairs, Ali delivered the Friday sermon at the state-controlled Qatar Grand Mosque in Doha. According to YouTube footage seen by The Sunday Telegraph, he praised the “great jihad” being undertaken by al-Nusra in Syria.

Since at least 2012, a man called Hajjaj al-Ajmi, though based in Kuwait, has been paying regular visits to the emirate to raise money for Jan. Online footage shows Ajmi telling Qatari audiences that humanitarian aid to Syria “is important, but the priority is to support the mujahideen and arming them… Give your money to the ones who will spend it on jihad, not aid.”

This speech was delivered at the invitation of the Ministry of Endowment and Islamic Affairs. Many of Ajmi’s other appeals were made from the pulpit at official government-controlled mosques, where he also spoke with the approval of the Ministry of Endowment and Islamic Affairs. Last month, the US designated  Ajmi a terrorist fundraiser.

Ajmi’s full-time “representative in Qatar” collecting donations in the fundraising drive was a man called Shaqer al-Shahwani, who works for the Ministry of Endowment and Islamic Affairs, preaches regularly at the Grand Mosque and broadcasts on Qatari television.

In the case of another designated al-Nusra terror fundraiser, Shafi al-Ajmi, the Qatari authorities could not have been under any illusion over what he was up to, since he boasted about it on Twitter. On June 24 last year, for instance, he announced that he had received $52,000 (£32,000) for al-Nusra from Qatar to “prepare the mujahideen” in Syria. At one point, he instructed donors to send their money through a semi-official Qatari government charity, the RAF, run by a member of the royal family.

Then there is Mohammed al-Arifi, a cleric now banned from Britain for allegedly grooming two young Welshmen into Isil. He was invited by the Qatari government twice, in March 2012 and January this year. The fact that he defended al-Nusra and issued a “declaration of obligation for jihad in Syria” after the first visit didn’t prevent the government asking him back.

Arifi popped up again in Qatar this summer – after he had been banned from Britain – at a Ramadan festival honouring a number of hardliners and extremists. It was co-hosted by the RAF, the Qatari royal charity, and the Aspire Zone Foundation, a government-sponsored body which played a key part in the emirate’s World Cup bid. Also speaking at the festival was another man banned from the UK, Wagdy Ghoneim, who has praised Osama bin Laden as a “hero and martyr” and was recorded leading audiences in anti-Semitic songs with the chorus “No to the Jews, descendants of the apes”.

There were two speeches by Zaghloul El-Naggar, author of an anti-Semitic book claiming that September 11 was a Western and Zionist conspiracy against Muslims. Another speaker, Nabil Al Awadi, sponsored the “great Kuwait campaign” to support 12,000 fighters in Syria. The campaign claims to have raised several million dollars to buy anti-aircraft missiles, and was also planning to buy heat-seeking missiles. All these people were then received by a member of the royal family.

Shafi Al-Ajmi, the fundraiser, gave a television interview recently, explaining why he was left alone by the Qataris. “All the Gulf intelligence agencies are competing in Syria and everyone is trying to get the lion’s share of the Syrian revolution,” he said.

And certainly, Qatar’s engagement with the extremists could be seen as a form of hedging its bets. It has tried to make friends with almost everybody, from the Taliban to Israel, with whom, alone in the Gulf, it once had trade relations. It shelters Hamas, Libyan Islamist militias and Muslim Brotherhood groups from across the region.

It’s not really working. Infuriated at the emirate’s providing sanctuary for the Hamas leadership, Israel now calls Qatar, in the words of its UN ambassador Ron Prosor, the “Club Med for terrorists”. After the overthrow of the Brotherhood government in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the other Gulf states – most of them deeply hostile to the Brotherhood – are putting the squeeze on Qatar. Some analysts say it is this, as much as support for Syrian jihadis, that explains the heat the Qataris are now feeling.

For Doha, it is getting harder and harder to keep up the balancing act.