South Korea Wants ‘Defense’ Cooperation with Hamas Host Qatar

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol told the state-run Qatar News Agency (QNA) that Seoul is seeking to expand “cooperation in various areas including energy, infrastructure, trade, investment, [and] the defense industry,” suggesting aiding the Qatari military as the nation hosts the jihadist terror group Hamas.

Hamas, whose aim is the genocide of the Jewish people and elimination of Israel as a state, maintains a “political office” for its leaders in Doha, Qatar’s capital. Leader Ismail Haniyeh and his top henchmen celebrated the killing of upwards of 1,400 people from a luxury hotel in Qatar on October 7, the day in which Hamas launched an unprecedented invasion of Israeli residential communities aiming to kill as many civilians as possible. The attack, which Hamas calls the “al-Aqsa flood,” featured extensive torture and gruesome killings of civilians, including burning children alive, decapitating babies, leaving the corpses of children with knives lodged in them, and the mass murder of families. Hamas terrorists also attacked a peace musical festival, opening fire on attendees and abducting, brutalizing, and killing hundreds.

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Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart News

Qatar has responded to the attack by condemning Israel and demanding Israel’s leaders not respond to the slaughter. On Tuesday, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, claimed that those mourning the victims of the Hamas killings had a “double standard” and were calling for “Israel to be given an unconditional green light and free licence to kill … to continue ignoring the reality of occupation, siege and settlement.”

Qatar has not modified its relationship with Hamas in any way following the killings.

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Yoon, a conservative whose foreign policy is predicated on elevating South Korea to a global power, arrived in Doha on Tuesday, the second stop in a Middle East tour that began with a visit this weekend to Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, Yoon similarly touted defense cooperation; his aides suggested that South Korea was finalizing negotiations to sell military equipment to Saudi Arabia. The sales will potentially fill a void left by American President Joe Biden when he banned the sale of “offensive” military equipment to the one-time U.S. ally a week into his presidency.

Prior to his arrival in Doha, Yoon gave an interview to the state-run QNA in which he celebrated Qatar as an economic and cultural success story and expressed hope for a greater presence in the country for Korean companies.

“Over the past half century, our two countries have continued to work together, contributing to each others [sic] advancement and prosperity in an exemplary manner, especially in the energy and construction sectors,” Yoon told the outlet. “For this reason, the Korean government intends to expand the scope of our cooperation.”

Yoon suggested Korean companies would work together with Qatar in “investment, the defense industry, agriculture, culture and people-to-people exchanges.”

“We will also push for cooperation programs which will bring more tangible benefits for the peoples of both countries. To this end, we will nurture an even broader range of channels for strategic communication,” he added.

Yoon noted that he is the first president in the history of South Korea to visit Qatar and is doing so on the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of relations between the two countries. Trade, he observed, had grown from a volume of $4 million in 1974 to $17.1 billion in 2022.

The South Korean president credited Qatar with helping South Korea maintain stable crude oil and gas supplies and claimed Qatar was “strengthening its role and contribution to promote regional peace.” Yoon also congratulated Qatar for hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup – an event considered a global disgrace by human rights activists who noted Qatar’s abhorrent record on slavery, torture and abuse of suspected gay people, attacks on the free press, and deprivation of the rights of women.

Yoon’s objectives in Qatar appear similar to those in Saudi Arabia, where he signed an extensive joint statement alongside the leaders of that country vowing extensive trade and diplomatic cooperation. On Monday, Principal Deputy National Security Adviser Kim Tae-hyo, who is traveling with Yoon, told reporters that defense business “is emerging as a blue ocean in our cooperation with Saudi Arabia,” meaning that Seoul soon expected to be engaging in “large-scale,” “long-term” defense deals.

“We intend to cooperate so that our weapons systems using our excellent defense industry technologies help strengthen Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities,” Kim said, “and this will serve as a strong force for further expanding our achievements in defense industry exports.”

The Korea Times reported this week that Yoon is likely attempting to sell the Cheongung-II missile defense system, which the United Arab Emirates (UAE) purchased and which could protect Saudi Arabia from attacks by Iran-backed Shiite terrorists, most likely the Yemeni Houthi terrorist organization. While boasting a long history of promotion of Wahhabism, a radical Sunni Islamist doctrine, Saudi Arabia has pivoted away from fundamentalism under current Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, making it a more favorable partner for countries such as South Korea.

Qatar, however, maintains ties to some of the world’s most notorious Islamic terrorist organizations. Paramount on that list is Hamas, which keeps a “political office” in Doha that the Qatari government defended in the aftermath of the October 7 massacres in Israel.

“This was started to be used as a way of communicating and bringing peace and calm into the region, not to instigate any war,” Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani asserted, referring to the Hamas office.

Canada’s CBC network asked the Qatari embassy in Ottawa to comment on the Hamas office in the country and received a similar response last week: “Regarding the Hamas office in Doha, it has been used from the beginning as a channel of communication and a means to bring peace to the region and that is in coordination with our western allies, particularly the United States.”

Doha was also for decades the home of the “political office” of the Afghan Taliban, a radical jihadist organization that no longer requires as much assistance abroad as it returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, a result of Biden breaking an agreement with the terrorists made under predecessor Donald Trump and extending the U.S. war in that country for an extra three months. Taliban terrorists refused to abide by their promises to cease attacking the Afghan government and affiliating with other terrorist groups following Biden’s decision, which they claimed invalidated the entire deal.

Yoon’s comments to QNA did not address Qatar’s longstanding ties to terrorist organizations.

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