The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, will be in Ankara today to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This is his first trip abroad since the beginning of the crisis between Doha and other Arab countries, prepared two days ago by the face to face between Erdogan himself and the Qatari foreign minister, Emir Mohammed bin Abdurrahman al-Thani. Since the beginning of the crisis, Turkey has sided in support of Qatar, by sending aid and strengthening the military contingent at its base in the Gulf country, while still trying to favor a diplomatic solution.
The crisis began with the decision of some Sunni Arab countries - Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, followed by Bahraini, a Shiite majority ruled by Sunnis - to isolate Qatar, a Sunni country: Qatar was accused of support terrorism and develop ties too tight with Iran, a country with a large majority Shiite and enemy number one of the Saudis. In recent months, several attempts have been made to try to resolve the crisis by the United States, Kuwait and Germany, without any hopeful outcomes. Qatar has never accepted the 13 points that the counterpart countries want to impose. One among them is to close Al Jazeera Arabic, accused of supporting terrorist propaganda.
Diplomatic relations between Qatar and Iran broke off in January 2016 after a group of Iranians attacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran and the Saudi consulate in Mashhad. The Qatari government, which was then a close ally of the other Sunni countries in the Gulf, rightly sided with the Saudis against Iran. As mentioned, it is not clear why Qatar has decided right now to send its ambassador to Tehran, the Iranian capital: according to some, the decision would be the response to a meeting between a member of the Qatari family, Abdullah al Thani. , and the Saudi King Salman, in the villa destined for the holidays that King Salman has outside Tangier, Morocco. The problem is that Abdullah al Thani lives in London and comes from a branch of the Qatari royal family that was ousted from power in a coup in 1972. Saudi Arabia has given no explanation as to the reasons for the meeting, but the Saudi newspapers they talked a lot about Abdullah al Thani's visit, presenting it as the beginning of a potential challenge to the authority of the current Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al Thani.
According to the New York Times, although few analysts think Abdullah could truly be a threat, Qataris have interpreted the Saudi move as a provocation and as proof that the blockade of countries that isolated them would want a change in Qatar's leadership. It is not the first time that the clashes between Qatar and the other Sunni Gulf countries have taken place in the press: the same crisis began after the Qatari state news agency attributed a sentence to the Emir of Qatar that had infuriated the Saudis and Emiratis: "There is no wisdom in harboring hostility towards Iran"; according to the same agency, al Thani had also condemned the inclusion of the Lebanese of Hezbollah and the Palestinians of Hamas in the list of terrorist organizations, defining both "resistance groups" and not "terrorist groups". The Qatari government had said that the news agency had been hacked, a thesis also supported by some information collected by US intelligence and emerged as early as last July, but the crisis had now begun.
Contacts and collaboration between the two governments have never ceased. Qatar has always claimed its right to maintain cordial relations with Iran and for the past three months the Iranians have provided the Qataris with supplies of various kinds and allowed their planes to fly over Iran's airspace. The Iranian intervention in the rescue of Qatar was very important for two reasons: because Qatar borders only with Saudi Arabia, and therefore the closure of the land borders, combined with the blocking of sea and air routes, made the isolation particularly problematic; and because Qatar is a country that is heavily dependent on imports of many different goods. The risk, some analysts pointed out, is that this break would benefit Iran in a particular way, which would thus have a significant influence in an area with a predominantly Sunni Arab.