German Minister: Qatar Funding ISIL Terrorists
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – German Development Minister Gerd Mueller accused Qatar on Wednesday of financing Takfiri terrorists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant who have seized wide areas of northern Iraq and have posted a video of a captive American journalist being beheaded.
"This kind of conflict, this kind of a crisis always has a history ... The ISIS troops, the weapons - these are lost sons, with some of them from Iraq," Mueller told German public broadcaster ZDF.
"You have to ask who is arming, who is financing ISIS troops. The keyword there is Qatar - and how do we deal with these people and states politically?" said Mueller, a member of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the center-right Bavarian sister party of Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats.
Mueller did not elaborate and presented no evidence of a Qatari link to the ISIL terrorist group. A German government spokesman said he was checking whether Mueller's remarks reflected the official view of Berlin.
Officials at the Foreign Ministry of Qatar, a wealthy Gulf Arab state, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on his accusation, Reuters reported.
Qatar has denied that it supports the insurgents in Syria and Iraq. Diplomats and opposition sources say that while Qatar supports relatively moderate rebels also backed by Saudi Arabia and the West, it also has backed more hardline factions seeking to set up a caliphate.
In March, David Cohen, the U.S. Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, cited reports of Qatari backing for insurgents in Syria and described this as a “permissive jurisdiction” for donors funding militants.
Proclaiming a "caliphate" straddling parts of Iraq and Syria, ISIL has overrun broad swathes of Sunni Muslim-populated northern and western Iraq with little resistance. They have pushed back Kurdish regional forces allied with the Baghdad central government and driven tens of thousands of minority communities including Christians and Yazidis from their homes.
ISIL circulated a video on Tuesday that purported to show the beheading of American journalist James Foley in revenge for U.S. air strikes against the insurgents in Iraq.
