Qatar seeks to sow sedition, spread chaos in Mauritania

Hossam al-Haddad

Qatar is currently intensifying its communications with the Muslim Brotherhood in Mauritania after realizing it is beginning to lose ground in the West African country, which has witnessed a new leadership rejecting Doha’s interference in its internal affairs.

Qatar has resorted to increasing efforts to empower the Brotherhood in Mauritania socially by helping them to establish commercial institutions, such as food stores, pharmacies, gas stations, car rental agencies and supporting black market activities, after sending funds directly to charities under government control.

Qatar’s attempts to drive Mauritania away from its Arab surroundings did not succeed, as Nouakchott began arranging its relations, making it an effective element in the war on terrorism and confronting extremists, a sign that would put it in the anti-Doha camp.

The UAE has allocated $2 billion to finance development in the West African country after Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani’s visit to Abu Dhabi earlier this month.

The expansion of the circle of rapprochement between Mauritania and many Arab countries has raised expectations that Qatar will increase feeding tensions in this country to limit the government’s attempts to support its ties with the Arab Gulf environment that rejects Qatari policies.

Rather than correcting its paths, Doha has increased the frequency of its interaction with its extremist allies in Mauritania, as a form of punishment or attempting to subdue it to distract its focus from any direct or indirect Qatari activity.

Doha views the increasing Gulf presence, Emirati and Saudi, in the scene of developments in Mauritania as an overwhelming defeat for it, after arguing that its support for elements of political Islam in this country is aimed at improving living conditions and injecting money to lift the economy out of its crises.

Access to the articulation of governance in Mauritania remains a dream, and Doha realizes that the only way to achieve it stems from the support of extremist groups, as it does in close African countries.

According to press reports, observers link Qatar’s focus on Mauritania with the problems that political Islam movements suffer in the African continent, as Doha seeks to take advantage of the roots of these movements in state structures, and provides a lot of support to avoid the negative repercussions that have occurred to its allies in Sudan, where the regime of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir got ousted.

It also seeks to thwart attempts by France and the United States to intensify their security strikes against extremist organizations in the African Sahel countries. Qatar’s Muslim Brotherhood allies rely on the strength of militants in Mauritania.

Qatar believes that strengthening its extreme Islamist arms in Nouakchott contributes to destabilizing it as a prelude to tighten its grip one of the region’s important axes, alongside Mauritania, Mali and Guinea. Doha also seeks to take advantage of the distinguished geographical location on the Atlantic Ocean in the operations of facilitating the transportation of terrorists to and from Africa.

However, the Mauritanian government paid attention to these attempts and took a series of measures that contributed to besieging terrorist groups and blocking many outlets, not to mention the supervision over funding sources of civil societies and educational and charitable centers that depend on Doha, which have been spreading jihadist thought and receiving huge funds to support its activities.

It is not expected that the Qatari incitement against the Mauritanian government will stop in light of the Mauritanian government’s success in marginalizing the Islamists, thus expanding the circle of their exclusion, so Doha resorted to urging them to barter the regime under the slogan of “either sharing or sabotage”, in a repeated scenario of what the Brotherhood did in all countries they sought to infiltrate and control.