The State Department should summon the Qatari ambassador to explain why his nation’s prime minister attended a wedding at which a senior terrorist financier was present.
First reported by Al Arabiya last Sunday (although Al Arabiya is a Saudi state news outlet biased against Qatar, its report withstands objective scrutiny in this case), the wedding incident was brought to my attention by Iraqi journalist Dalia al-Aqidi.
Because of the centrality of family in Qatari political identity, its prime minister must have known who he was hanging out with — the terrorist Abdulrahman al-Nuaimi. Al-Nuaimi is a particularly unpleasant man responsible for acting as an link between rich zealots and various al Qaeda syndicates over the past 15 years. As the Treasury Department outlines, al-Nuaimi’s prowess in raising money for al Qaeda groups — to include the organization’s brutal Iraq affiliate (AQI) — made him a key figure on the entrepreneurial terrorist fundraising circuit. Think of him as the Jeff Bezos of jihadism.
But his antics make al-Nuaimi culpable in some of al Qaeda’s worse atrocities (read Bing West’s No True Glory for accounts of the AQI torture chambers the Marines found in Fallujah in 2004).
In turn, by attending the wedding alongside al-Nuaimi, the Qatari elite are showing that they’re not only willing to allow this killer, whose name is on U.S. and European Union terrorist lists, to live it up in public, but they’re even willing to party with him. It’s a joke.
While the Qatari government has long flirted with Salafi-Jihadism, it recently promised President Trump to expect a change in course. Sadly, it seems, the Qataris are content to believe they can play Trump for a fool. He should educate them as to their error.
