Is Qatar an ally or an enemy in the fight against terror finance? 

Excerpt

Eleven days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned a terror financier named Muhammad Nasrallah. According to Treasury, Nasrallah has “close ties to the Iranian regime” and “was involved in the transfer of tens of millions of dollars to Hamas.”  

Nasrallah, based in Qatar, was operating there for years before Hamas struck.

In 2017, the U.S. and Qatar had formally pledged to combat terror finance together. So the longtime presence of a major, Iran-linked Hamas financier on Qatari soil raises serious questions about how much change the U.S.-Qatar memorandum of understanding has yielded. With the Middle East teetering on the brink of a regional war, Washington needs to assess the agreement’s impact.

Natalie Ecanow is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan research institute in Washington, focusing on national security and foreign policy.