Who's Actually in Qatar?

Abstract

The latest scandal in the ongoing Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) crisis revealed email leaks from Emirati Ambassador to the United States Yousif al-Otaiba about his country’s desire to host an embassy for the Taliban. The week prior to this revelation, Abu Dhabi’s ambassador to Washington publicly spoke about his suspicions of Qatar hosting the Taliban in an interview with Charlie Rose: “I don’t think it is a coincidence that inside Doha you have the Hamas leadership, you have a Taliban embassy, you have the Muslim Brotherhood leadership.” This latest rhetoric comes amidst a barrage of articles in the Emirati and Saudi press claiming to expose historical links between the Qatari government and the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the fact that all GCC states took in large numbers of Brotherhood sympathizers during the 1950s and 1960s, with several in powerful public positions into the late 1970s. In the face of increasingly polarized media output and official rhetoric, what is missing is an examination of (a) who has found refuge in Qatar and (b) the extent to which the Qatari leadership’s hosting of certain prominent personalities is based on ideological links.