US President Donald Trump on Friday accused Qatar’s leadership of bankrolling extremists and demanded a halt to that funding, as a diplomatic standoff between the Persian Gulf emirate and its neighbors escalated.
Trump’s stern warning overshadowed an earlier declaration from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—who had also urged Saudi Arabia and its allies to ease their land and sea “blockade” of Qatar, AFP reported.
But US officials insisted that both men were sending the same message that the countries of the region should not allow their differences to hinder the fight against extremism.
The gas-rich emirate is home to the largest US airbase in the Middle East, making it a key ally in the US-led coalition against the self-styled Islamic State terrorist group in Iraq and Syria.
But it has fallen out with its Arab neighbors who accuse it of sponsoring extremist groups and fomenting trouble across the region.
The neighbors also resent Qatar’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood movement and its sponsorship of the pan-Arab satellite television network Aljazeera, which has given opposition figures a platform.
Qatar has denounced the allegations of terror funding as baseless and has received the support of its close ally Turkey, which has approved the deployment of troops to defend the emirate.
“The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level,” Trump told reporters in the White House Rose Garden.
“They have to end that funding and its extremist ideology in terms of funding,” he said, lumping Qatar with other nations that he said must “stop teaching people to kill other people”.
This flies in the face of a well-established fact that the Wahhabi ideology fueling the terrorist engine is promoted by Saudi rulers across the world and supported by its minions, the UAE and Bahrain.
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