Saudi Arabia reopens all borders with Qatar
Saudi Arabia has agreed to reopen land, air and sea links with Qatar, deescalating a feud that has sharply divided the Middle East for more than three years, according to the government of Kuwait, which has been mediating the dispute.
An announcement carried by Kuwait’s state news agency, citing the country’s foreign minister, said the borders and the airspace between Saudi Arabia and Qatar would reopen as of yesterday.
The announcement came a day before Saudi Arabia was set to host an annual summit of Persian Gulf states.
A Saudi government spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that the summit aimed at ‘‘reunification and solidarity in facing the challenges in our region,’’ according to the official Saudi Press Agency.
Led by Saudi Arabia, a group of Arab countries made a diplomatic break with Qatar in June 2017, accusing it of supporting terrorist groups. The countries – which included the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain – cut links by land, sea and air, and imposed an economic blockade on Qatar. The rift was the most serious in decades among the Persian Gulf monarchies and complicated US efforts to unify Arab allies against the Islamic State militant group as well as Iran, the Trump administration’s main regional adversary.
Qatar, which hosts a major base for the US military’s Central Command, denied sponsoring terrorist groups. But Qatar’s support for Islamist groups in the region and its hosting of the influential Al Jazeera news channel have been sources of anguish for Saudi Arabia and its allies for years.
A senior Trump administration official told the Reuters news agency that Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain, would sign an agreement ending their dispute with Qatar at the Saudi summit. Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser, helped broker the deal, the official said.
Kushner, Middle East envoy Avi Berkowitz and Brian Hook, a special State Department adviser, are travelling to Saudi Arabia to attend a signing ceremony formalising the reopening of Saudi airspace and land and sea borders with Qatar, a senior US official said.
A person familiar with the negotiations said Saudi Arabia and its allies had dropped the list of 13 demands they had made of Qatar for ending the blockade.
The demands had included shutting down Al Jazeera and scaling back Qatar’s co-operation with Iran.
Qatar, in turn, had agreed to freeze legal actions against the blockading states at the World Trade Organisation and other institutions, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity. – Washington Post