Qatarthe owner of France’s main soccer team, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and also the host of the World Cup, also hosts the taliban and Hamas. Both groups have representative offices in that emirate, which represents for some the main focus of expansion of the Muslim Brothersone of the most important fundamentalist currents in the Islamic world, within which Hamas falls, more or less.
And in Qatar there is 6 billion dollars (5,690 million euros) from Iran. The Islamic Republic had been authorized by the US to use that money only in purchasing food and medicinefollowing a mechanism very similar to that of oil for food program, applied in the 1990s with Iraq, under which the money that country obtained from the sale of its oil remained in an account in Switzerland supervised by the UN. The Baghdad regime could only use these resources to buy food. Some foods that were necessary precisely for the blockade that the UN had imposed on Iraq (whose leader, Saddam Hussein, was also not about to spend his fortune on feeding his subjects).
Today, the US announced that That money stays frozen in Qatar. That is to say: he will not allow Tehran to use him to buy drugs or food because of his links with Hamas. It is the first deterioration in the tenuous relations between Iran and the United States, which seem destined to worsen as the war between Hamas and Israel worsens, despite the fact that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv seem to have found any link between Tehran and the terrorist offensive. of Hamas.
If neither the Biden Government nor that of Netanyahu They see Iran’s hand behind the war, why do they adopt that measure? The reason is simple: internal politics. The Republican opposition has been using the 6 billion as a weapon against the Biden Government. Senator and candidate for the White House Tim Scott – whose campaign is financed entirely by Silicon Valley billionaire Larry Ellison, founder of the software company Oracle – has gone so far as to say that the US president “has hands stained with blood“.
Those 6 billion are not Americans, but South Koreans. His story is as follows: in 2018, when Donald Trump broke the nuclear deal of Barack Obama with Iran and imposed a trade blockade on that country, allowing South Korea to continue making oil purchases from Iran. In 2019, Trump toughened that policy, and Seoul was left unable to trade with Iran and with 6 billion that it owed to Tehran for its crude oil.