Qatar at the center of the Afghan diplomatic game

In the Afghan affair, Qatar is omnipresent. The micro-state, located 2,000 kilometers from Kabul, plays a key role, both in the process of evacuating people threatened by the return to power of the Taliban and in the first signs of contact with the new masters of Kabul and efforts to contain the humanitarian crisis threatening to overwhelm the country.

It is to Qatar that the group of Franco-Afghans who succeeded, Friday, September 10, in flying out of Kabul, owe their new-found freedom. The Arab-Persian Gulf monarchy made it possible to reopen the airport, rehabilitating, in record time, the passenger terminal ransacked at the end of August, in the scramble for the tarmac triggered by the entry of Pashtun fundamentalists into Kabul. And it was aboard a Boeing of Qatar Airways, the company of the opulent gas principality, that the binationals and members of their families – 49 people out of a total of 158 passengers – landed in Doha, before re-embarking. on a plane to Paris.

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Banished from the Gulf four years ago, for his refusal to conform to the anti-Iran and anti-Islam political line of the Saudis and Emiratis, threatened at that time with losing his entries in the White House, where the it was denounced its connections with the “bearded”, the emirate has spectacularly returned to the center of the diplomatic game. He is drawing dividends from his patient mediation work in the Afghan crisis, which culminated with the agreement on the American withdrawal, signed with the Taliban, in February 2020, in Doha. For all countries wishing to weigh in on this issue, Doha has become the obligatory crossing point.

As evidenced by the parade, since the beginning of the month, in the Qatari capital, of the main Western foreign ministers. The latest to come after his American, British, German, Dutch and Italian counterparts, Jean-Yves Le Drian, the head of French diplomacy, welcomed, Monday, September 13, the “Exceptional mobilization” of the monarchy.

“Strong partnership”

Of the 124,000 Afghans and foreigners who have fled from Kabul since the fall of President Ashraf Ghani’s regime in mid-August – a consequence of the departure of American soldiers – half have passed through Qatari soil. All have been tested for Covid-19, housed, fed and, for some, treated at Doha’s expense.

If other countries have facilitated this gigantic airlift, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the neighbor and rival of Qatar which has opened its borders to 40,000 evacuees, none has agreed to the Doha efforts. To unclog the hangars of Al-Udeid, the huge American base, in the middle of the Qatari desert, where the displaced people from Afghanistan were initially installed, the emirate requisitioned hotels as well as complexes, built for the World Cup. football 2022. The Qatari Ambassador in Kabul personally escorted US nationals to the airport.

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