Qatar’s Plucky Plan to Outlast the Saudi Embargo
From left, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman with Sheikh Abdullah Bin Ali Al-Thani of Qatar. In 1972, the sheikh’s brother was overthrown as Qatar’s first ruler by the grandfather of the country’s current emir.
Source: Saudi Press Agency
For a moment, it looked like Saudi Arabia might be easing up on its estranged neighbor Qatar. On Aug. 17, King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud Salman, the Saudi monarch, lifted restrictions on Qataris who want to take part in the annual hajj pilgrimage beginning on Aug. 30. The king even offered to fly Qataris to Mecca on Saudi airplanes as his guests. It was the Saudis’ warmest action toward Qatar since June, when the kingdom and three of its Arab allies imposed an embargo against the tiny emirate to punish it for allegedly supporting Islamic insurgents.
The hajj gesture, however, was part of a double-move against Qatar’s ruling family that’s only made the bad blood worse. The Saudis credited the “mediation” to an elderly descendant of Qatar’s founder, a royal cousin plucked from obscurity for surprise audiences with King Salman and his powerful son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A photo distributed by the Saudi Press Agency showed the beaming Saudi king holding hands with Sheikh Abdullah Bin Ali Al Thani, whose brother was overthrown as Qatar’s first ruler in 1972 by the grandfather of Qatar’s current emir. “That will be viewed as intensely provocative in Doha,” Qatar’s capital, says Kristian Ulrichsen of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “They’re clearly trying to present this guy as an alternative to Qatar’s ruling elite.”