Qatar

While the Saudi-led campaign to starve Qatar's citizens may end up short of the target, with both Turkey and Iran volunteering to provide needed staples to the isolated Gulf nation while local entrepreneurs have started a cow paradropping campaign to offset the decline in milk imports, a more pressing problem has emerged: Qatar's financial system is running out of dollars. As Bloomberg reports, several Qatari banks have boosted interest rates on dollar deposits to shore up liquidity as the Saudi-led campaign to isolate the gas-rich Arab state intensifies.

Yesterday we reported that as the Qatar crisis continues with no resolution in sight, in an act of generosity toward its distressed Gulf neighbor, Iran dispatched four cargo planes of food to Qatar and plans to provide 100 tonnes of fruit and vegetable every day. Qatar has also been holding talks with Iran and Turkey to secure food and water supplies after Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain cut links, accusing Doha of supporting terrorism.

If there was any confusion on which side of the Qatar crisis Iran found itself, it was swept away today after Iran's Tasnim news, cited by Turkey's Anadolu Agency, reported that Iran plans to send two warships to Oman on Sunday. The two ships will depart using Iran's southern waters off the port city of Bandar Abbas for an overseas mission to the Arab Peninsula state and then on to international waters.

Who better to defend Qatar it is a hotbed of terrorism-funding (as per a recent list released by Saudi Arabia et al according to which 59 individuals and 12 entities in Qatar are terrorist) than the US Attorney General who served during the September 11 attacks, John Ashcroft. At least that's what the government of Qatar is thinking, which hired the former US AG to defend the world's wealthiest (on a GDP/capita basis) nation from accusations by Donald Trump and Arab neighbors that it supports terrorism.

Germany's foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel warned that the ongoing isolation of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and its allies could lead to a war in the Gulf region, according to an interview he gave to Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, although he added that he still saw a chance to defuse the tension.

"There is a danger that this dispute could lead to war," Gabriel said citing what he called a "dramatic" harshness in relations between allied and neighbouring countries in the Gulf.