Is Qatar an ally or an enemy within the battle in opposition to terror finance? 

Eleven days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned a terror financier named Muhammad Nasrallah. Based on Treasury, Nasrallah has “shut ties to the Iranian regime” and “was concerned within the switch of tens of tens of millions of {dollars} to Hamas.”  

Nasrallah, primarily based in Qatar, was working there for years earlier than Hamas struck.

In 2017, the U.S. and Qatar had formally pledged to fight terror finance collectively. So the longtime presence of a serious, Iran-linked Hamas financier on Qatari soil raises severe questions on how a lot change the U.S.-Qatar memorandum of understanding has yielded. With the Center East teetering on the brink of a regional war, Washington must assess the settlement’s influence. 

Qatar stays one of many leading state-sponsors of Hamas. Doha hosts Hamas’s political workplace, harbors senior Hamas leaders and showers the Hamas-run authorities in Gaza with tons of of tens of millions of {dollars} every year. The U.S. and Israel implicitly signed off on this arrangement, with the expectation that the Qatari funds would stabilize Gaza and that Doha would offer Hamas sanctuary however crack down on home-grown terror finance exercise. Evidently, these assumptions have been misplaced.

Whereas monetary crime can crop up wherever, there may be motive to consider that Qatar stays an oasis for terror finance.

Final 12 months, the Monetary Motion Activity Drive — a global cash laundering and terror finance watchdog — found that Qatar “has not demonstrated that it’s successfully figuring out, investigating, or prosecuting” terror financing instances. Qatar’s total terror finance conviction fee is simply 28 p.c, which the duty pressure notes is particularly low, given the emirate’s threat profile and the Qatari “felony system’s response to different monetary crimes.” Certainly, Qatar hasn’t convicted a single terror financier since 2018.  

The Treasury Division appears conscious that Doha has much more work to do when it comes to combatting terror finance.

In February, Undersecretary of the Treasury Brian Nelson famous “the significance of addressing terrorist financing vulnerabilities” in Qatar and different nations within the area in testimony earlier than the Home Monetary Companies Committee. Whether or not Qatar has made needed progress combatting terror finance is a query value asking; the complete textual content of the 2017 U.S.-Qatar memorandum was by no means made public, so it’s onerous to know what benchmarks Doha pledged to fulfill and in what timeframe.

Right here’s what we do know: the memorandum got here one month after almost each nation within the Gulf Cooperation Council severed ties with Qatar, accusing the emirate of “funding” and “adopting” extremist teams, amongst different offenses. Weeks earlier, then-President Trump had announced in Riyadh the creation of the U.S.-Gulf Cooperation Council Terrorist Financing Concentrating on Middle — a multilateral initiative to disrupt terror financing networks.  

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson applauded the Qataris “for being the primary to reply to President Trump’s problem on the Riyadh Summit to cease the funding of terrorism.” He pledged that, collectively, Washington and Doha would “do extra to maintain the area and our homeland secure.” Together with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, Tillerson said the settlement “specifies the steps every nation will take to cease terrorism financing globally, and units a timeline for its implementation.”   

The Qataris appeared able to crack down on terror finance. In March 2018, for instance, Doha placed greater than two dozen folks and entities on a terrorism blacklist, together with two Qatari nationals whom the blockading Arab nations had beforehand recognized as financiers of the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Entrance in Syria. The subsequent 12 months, Qatar issued a new law to boost its anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing efforts. 

Doha additionally teamed up with Washington in 2021 to sanction eight targets linked to a “main Hezbollah monetary community primarily based within the Arabian Peninsula” that remained lively in Qatar by means of at the least 2019. A type of targets was a Qatar-based property administration firm owned by a financier named Sulaiman al-Banai. Based on the U.S. Treasury, al-Banai was “was a main supervisor” of his relative and fellow Hezbollah funder’s “enterprise and monetary exercise in Qatar and overseas.” 

Larger congressional oversight of the 2017 U.S.-Qatar terror finance memorandum is clearly wanted. Particularly, lawmakers ought to request that the U.S. Authorities Accountability Workplace evaluate Qatar’s progress combatting terror finance and report again on the implementation and enforcement of the 2017 settlement as a approach of offering an outdoor, neutral evaluation.  

Qatar can not stay a lax setting for funders of terror and on the identical time function a regional mediator and shut ally of the USA. In the case of terror finance, Qatar has not but been exonerated. 

Natalie Ecanow is a analysis analyst on the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan analysis institute in Washington, specializing in nationwide safety and international coverage.