WASHINGTON - As an intermittent supply of arms to the Syrian opposition gathered momentum last year, President Barack Obama’s administration repeatedly implored its Arab allies to keep one type of powerful weapon out of the rebels’ hands: heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles.
The missiles, U.S. officials warned, could one day be used by terrorist groups, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida, to shoot down civilian aircraft.
But one country ignored this admonition: Qatar, the tiny, oil-and-gas-rich emirate that has made itself the indispensable nation to rebel forces battling Arab governments and that has been shipping arms to the Syrian rebels fighting the government of President Bashar Assad since 2011.
Since the beginning of the year, according to four U.S. and Middle Eastern officials with knowledge of intelligence reports on the weapons, Qatar has used a shadowy arms network to move at least two shipments of shoulder-fired missiles, one of them a batch of Chinese-made FN-6s, to Syrian rebels who have used them against Assad’s air force. Deployment of the missiles comes at a time when U.S. officials expect that Obama’s decision to begin a limited effort to arm the Syrian rebels might be interpreted by Qatar, along with other Arab countries supporting the rebels, as a green light to drastically expand arms shipments.
Qatar’s aggressive effort to bolster the Syrian opposition is the latest brash move by a country that has been using its wealth to elbow its way to the forefront of Middle Eastern statecraft, confounding its allies in the region and in the West. The strategy is expected to continue even though Qatar’s longtime leader, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, stepped down last week, allowing his 33-year old son to succeed him.
“They punch immensely above their weight,” one senior Western diplomat said of the Qataris. “They keep everyone off balance by not being in anyone’s pocket.
“Their influence comes partly from being unpredictable.”
Obama, during a private meeting in Washington in April, warned Hamad about the dangers of arming Islamic radicals in Syria, although U.S. officials for the most part have been wary of applying too much pressure on the Qatari government. “Syria is their backyard, and they have their own interests they are pursuing,” one administration official said.
Qatari officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The United States has little leverage over Qatar on the Syria issue, because it needs the Qataris’ help on other fronts. Qatar is poised to host peace talks between U.S. and Afghan officials and the Taliban, who have set up a political office in Doha, the Qatari capital. The U.S. Central Command’s forward base in Qatar gives the U.S. military a command post in the heart of a strategically vital but volatile region.
Qatar’s covert efforts to back the Syrian rebels began at the same time that it was increasing its support for opposition fighters in Libya trying to overthrow the government of Moammar Gadhafi. Its ability to be an active player in a global gray market for arms was enhanced by the C-17 military transport planes it bought from Boeing in2008, when it became the first nation in the Middle East to have the durable, long-range aircraft.
The Obama administration quietly blessed the arms shipments to Libya of machine guns, automatic rifles, mortars and ammunition, but U.S. officials later grew concerned as evidence grew that Qatar was giving the weapons to Islamic militants there.
U.S. and Arab officials have expressed worry about something similar happening in Syria, where Islamists in the north have turned into the most capable section of the opposition, in part because of the flow of weapons from Qatar. Saudi Arabia recently has tried to take a greater role in managing the weapons shipments to Syrian rebels, but officials and outside experts said the Qatari shipments continue.
The greatest worry is over the shoulder-fired missiles - called man-portable air-defense systems - that Qatar has sent to Syria since the beginning of the year. Videos posted online show rebels in Syria with the weapons, including the Chinese FN-6models provided by Qatar, and occasionally using them in battle.
The first videos surfaced in February and showed rebels wielding the Chinese missiles, which had not been seen in the conflict previously and were not known to be in Syrian government possession. One of the missiles was shown destroying a Syrian air force helicopter.
Western officials and rebels alike say these missiles were provided by Qatar, which had bought them from an unknown seller and took them to Turkey. The shipment was at least the second anti-aircraft transfer under the Qataris’ hand, they said. A previous shipment of former Eastern-bloc missiles had come from former Gadhafi stockpiles made accessible by the toppling of Gadhafi in 2011.
The shipments were small, the Western officials and rebels said, amounting to no more than a few dozen missiles. And rebels said the Chinese shipments had been plagued with technical problems and sometimes fail to fire. The first FN-6s were seen in the custody of groups under the Free Syrian Army banner, suggesting that they were being distributed, at least initially, to fighters backed by the United States and not directly to extremists or groups with ties to al-Qaida.
U.S. and Arab officials said Qatar’s strategy was a mixture of ideology - the ruling family’s belief in a prominent role for Islam in political life - and more hard-nosed calculations.
“They like to back winners,” one Middle Eastern official said.
In meetings with Obama, the leaders of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have expressed a host of grievances about the Qatari shipments and have complained that Qatar is pursuing a reckless strategy of arming Syrian rebels.
In Obama’s meeting with Hamad at the White House on April 23, U.S. officials said he had warned the Qatari leader that the weapons were making their way to radical groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the Nusra Front, an al-Qaida-affiliated group that the United States has designated as a terrorist organization.
“It was very important for the Qataris to understand that Nusra is not only an organization that destabilizes the situation in Syria,” one senior Obama administration official said. “It’s a national security interest of ours that they not have weapons.”
But Charles Lister, an analyst with the IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London who follows the Syrian opposition groups closely, said there was evidence in recent weeks that Qatar had increased its backing of hard-line Islamic militant groups active in northern Syria.
Lister said there was no hard evidence that Qatar was arming the Nusra Front, but he said that because of existing militant dynamics, the transfer of Qatari-provided arms to certain targeted groups would result in the same practical effect.
“It’s inevitable that any weapons supplied by a regional state like Qatar,” he said in an e-mail, “will be used at least in joint operations with Jabhat al-Nusra - if not shared with the group.”
At least some extremists already have acquired heat-seeking missiles and have posted videos of them, although the sources for these arms are not apparent from videos alone. And they appear to have been made principally in the former Eastern bloc, not in China.
Information for this article was contributed by Erin Banco, Mark Landler and Karam Shoumali of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/30/2013