In an apparent effort to "facilitate peace talks," Al Jazeera reports that the Taliban - the armed Islamic fundamentalist group - will open a political office Doha, Qatar tomorrow.
- AFGHANISTAN'S TALIBAN TO OPEN OFFICE IN QATAR TOMORROW: JAZEERA
- JAZEERA CITES UNIDENTIFIED SOURCES ON TALIBAN POLITICAL OFFICE
Until earlier this year, Afghan President Karzai was strongly opposed to the Taliban having a meeting venue outside Afghanistan, but the US has pushed for the Taliban to be present at the negotiating table as Washington prepares to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in the next two years. This opening comes on the heels of accusations (here [5] and as we discussed here [6]) that Qatar (and Saudi Arabia) is reviving al-Qaeda in Iraq and now Syria.
As Press TV's al-ISA noted [5]:
[Saudi Arabia and Qatar] basically have convinced al-Qaeda through their dramatic influence that if you concentrate and break Syria, then Iraq will automatically fall by actually forming a Sunni radical government which is along the lines or strategically aligned with the Wahhabi-Salafi government in Saudi Arabia and also backed up by Qatar.
and as we noted previously [6]:
...Qatar doing everything it can to promote bloodshed, death and destruction by using not Syrian rebels, but mercenaries: professional citizens who are paid handsomely to fight and kill members of the elected regime (unpopular as it may be), for what? So that the unimaginably rich emirs of Qatar can get even richer.