Riyadh: Saudi Arabia and the UAE on Saturday welcomed an accusation by US President Donald Trump that Qatar was bankrolling extremism.
Trump’s comments came as Washington joins intensifying international efforts to heal the worsening rift between the key Western Gulf allies, which has escalated into the region’s worst diplomatic crisis in years.
The UAE welcomed “President Trump’s leadership in challenging Qatar’s troubling support for extremism”.
“The next step is for Qatar to acknowledge these concerns and commit to reexamine its regional policies,” Yousuf Al Otaiba, UAE Ambassador to the United States, told WAM. “This will provide the necessary basis for any discussions,” he added.
Saudi Arabia said an immediate change of policy by Qatar was essential.
“Fighting terrorism and extremism is no longer a choice, rather... a commitment requiring decisive and swift action to cut off all funding sources for terrorism regardless of its financier,” the Saudi Press Agency cited an official source as saying.
Bahrain “stressed the necessity of Qatar’s commitment to correct its policies and to engage in a transparent manner in counter-terrorism efforts,” its official BNA news agency said.
Qatar has historically “been a funder of terrorism at a very high level” and that has to stop, Trump said Friday at a White House news conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.
Trump said the nations that took the action on Qatar came to him in the wake of his conference in the region to discuss “confronting Qatar over its behaviour”.
“So we had a decision to make: Do we take the easy road or do we finally take a hard but necessary action?” Trump said. “We had to stop the funding of terrorism.”
The Gulf states have given Qatari citizens 14 days to leave, banned Qatari flights from their airspace and closed its only land border.
Qatari Foreign Minister Shaikh Mohammad Bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani was in Moscow on Saturday after talks in Germany on Friday.
Turkey, meanwhile, hosted the Bahraini foreign minister for talks on the crisis.
