UAE Tried But Failed to Host Taliban ‘Embassy’

Amid the blockade of the state of Qatar, the four nations that have targeted the emirate have complained bitterly of Qatar “hosting extremists,” with one of the most common examples cited the 2013 opening of the Taliban “embassy in exile” in Doha.

Newly leaked emails, however, show that one of the four blockading states, the United Arab Emirates, had actually fought quite seriously to host the Taliban themselves, and reacted quite bitterly when the Qatari capital beat them out as the host, Antiwar reported.

Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba reacted angrily back in 2013 to losing the embassy bid, saying Qatar wanted to be “in the middle of everything.” In interviews in recent weeks, Otaiba has angrily presented the mere presence of the embassy as proof Qatar is at odds with the whole region.

The New York Times reported on Monday that Otaiba had received an “angry call” from UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, complaining that the Taliban had ended up in Qatar and not the UAE, according to messages in the ambassador’s Hotmail account.

“I got an angry call from [Zayed] saying how come we weren’t told,” Otaiba wrote to an American official, referring to the decision on choosing Qatar to host the Taliban.

The newspaper obtained another email dated September 12, 2011, in which a UAE official questioned the US position on the Taliban office’s location.

The latest email leak comes from a group called “GlobalLeaks”, which is not affiliated with the software developer, GlobaLeaks.

GlobalLeaks told Newsweek that the recent messages are proof of the “biggest hypocrisy” in the Qatar crisis.

Neither the UAE Embassy nor the US State Department has responded to Otaiba’s leaked emails.