Doha Hunts For Whistleblowers Who Revealed Qatar's Funding Of ISIS

Qatar National Bank (QNB) and Qatar Charity (QC) are attempting to uncover the identities of confidential sources that supplied documents to lawyers representing the family of murdered US journalist Steven Sotloff, which allege the financial institutions – acting at the behest of Qatar’s royal family – wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to the ISIS judge who ordered Sotloff’s execution.

QNB and QC filed an application on March 12 in the US to obtain "limited discovery" of the law firm representing Sotloff’s family, specifically regarding the names of those who provided the bank records linking Doha to the murder. In an email to Bloomberg, the general counsel for QNB confirmed the filing and said the bank "is the victim of an effort to tarnish its reputation" and plans to hold the individuals "to account to the fullest extent of the law." Sotloff and another US journalist, James Foley, were beheaded in 2014 by ISIS in Syria. The terrorist group published videos of its executions online directed at US government officials. 

In a May 2022 lawsuit filed in Florida, Sotloff’s family accused the Qatari institutions of wiring $800,000 to ISIS judge Fadhel al-Salim before he ordered Sotloff’s execution. The family also says Qatar "knowingly funded extremist insurgents" to destabilize the Syrian government and named both QNB and QC as co-conspirators in the murder.

"The amount of assistance – $800,000 – was substantial as evidenced by Salim’s ability to cross over into Syria the very next day to begin raising his ISIS brigade," Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks from the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida said in May 2023 when he ruled against dismissing the case. 

"The allegations plausibly show that Defendants, in participating in a terrorism financing conspiracy, held a culpable state of mind in relation to the transaction and the foreseeable acts of terror to follow," the US judge highlighted.

"Perhaps the most outstanding allegation in support of a conspiracy is that [former Qatari Prime Minister] Hammad bin Jassim funded several terrorist organizations at a September 2011 meeting attended by the apparent ‘who’s who’ of terrorism financing," Middlebrooks added. "Simultaneously, Hammad bin Jassim was a member of the Royal Family who served as prime minister, foreign minister, and head of the Qatar Investment Authority, which held a 50 percent stake in QNB."

Following years of improved relations between Doha and Damascus in the early 2000s, the 2011 outbreak of unrest in Syria quickly showed signs of a Qatari campaign to destabilize the country, starting with Al-Jazeera – Doha's most prominent media outlet – and its biased, often inciteful coverage of events in the Levantine nation.

Qatar became one of the first foreign entrants into the Syrian conflict, bank-rolling armed factions in coordination with the CIA, including the precursor to Al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Jabhat al-Nusra. Doha’s role was even acknowledged by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which stated in 2016 that the Nusra Front "probably received logistical, financial and material assistance from the elements of the Turkish and Qatari governments."

"It turned out that all the steps of Qatari and Turkish rapprochement before the war were part of a US plan to contain Syria and pass the Qatari gas pipeline through its territory to Turkiye and then Europe, which is what President Assad was aware of. After the US discovered the difficulty of containing Syria, the decision was taken to overthrow the regime and divide the country, and this is one of the reasons for the war. Unfortunately, Qatar, with its money, media, and support for terrorist groups, spearheaded this conspiracy, and still is," Bassam Abu Abdallah, former cultural attache at Syria's embassy in Ankara and current Al-Watan columnist, told The Cradle in October 2022.

At the height of the Syrian war in October 2014, then-US vice president Joe Biden candidly spoke about how Washington's Sunni Muslim allies have been responsible for funding and arming Al-Qaeda-type extremist militants in Syria.

"Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The Turks were great friends – and I have the greatest relationship with Erdogan, which I just spent a lot of time with – the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni–Shia war; what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world" the current US president said during a discussion at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics.

"Now you think I’m exaggerating – take a look. Where did all of this go? So now what’s happening? All of a sudden, everybody’s awakened because this outfit called ISIL [ISIS], which was Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which, when they were essentially thrown out of Iraq, found open space in territory in eastern Syria, working with Al-Nusra, who we declared a terrorist group early on and we could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them," Biden added.

In 2016, WikiLeaks released an email from former US State Secretary Hillary Clinton about Saudi and Qatari funding for ISIS. "We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region," Clinton's email reads.