Another Blast from the Past - Qatar comes to Northern Mali too...

From the Moor Next Door...

Suspicions that Ansar Ed-Dine has been receiving funding from Qatar has circulated in Mali for several months. Reports (as yet unconfirmed) that a ‘Qatari’ aircraft landed at Gao, full of weapons, money and drugs, for example, emerged near the beginning of the conflict. The original report cites a French military intelligence report as indicating that Qatar has provided financial support to all three of the main armed groups in northern Mali: Iyad Ag Ghali’s Ansar Ed-Dine, al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJWA). . .

On 02 July 2012, al-Arab published an article (‘Monitoring $5 million in relief programs: A Field Office of the Qatari Red Crescent in northern Mali’) describing the work of the four Qatari Red Crescent workers whose activities in Gao have been fuel for a number of rumours about Qatar’s supposed role in Mali, which has been a favourite subject of the Algerian and French press over the last few months. Al-Arab’s article lays out the men’s activities during the June confrontations in Gao. The men arrived in May.