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The Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani; DR
By Sadek Sahraoui – According to information from the BBC, Qatar is suspected of having financed, somewhat in the manner of Lafarge, terrorist groups through financial dealings as a result of abduction in December 2015 of 28 members of the royal family while participating in a falcon hunt in Iraq. In total, the hostages spent 16 months in captivity.
According to the British public media, Doha would have paid more than a billion dollars to release them. The money would have been paid to groups and individuals considered "terrorists" by the United States, such as Kataeb Hezbollah in Iraq and Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, formerly known as Front Al-Nusra, while was affiliated with al-Qaeda in Syria.
The Qatari authorities, for their part, claim that no money has been paid to "terrorists" but only to the Iraqi state. The money would still be, according to them, in the vault of the Central Bank of Iraq in Baghdad. The Kataeb Hezbollah would have been the largest beneficiary of these sums in exchange for hostages (nearly 50 million, according to information from the BBC). The hostage crisis ended in April 2017. A Qatar Airways plane would have gone to Baghdad to deliver the money and bring back the hostages. These elements were also disclosed by the Washington Post in April 2018.
S. S.
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