Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the Soufan Center has published what it calls an assessment of the global jihadi movement “on the evidence.” Nine contributors, 636 endnotes, a preface by Ali Soufan; the credentials are impeccable. Yet, the book is a study in omission, and the institution’s audited accounts explain this omission better than its editors do.
This author read all 189 pages and counted. The word “Qatar” appears three times, never as a subject. “Türkiye” appears six times, never as a subject. “Muslim Brotherhood” does not appear, nor do “Erdoğan,” “Haniyeh,” “Qaradawi,” and “charity.” Hamas appears 76 times, and the editors define it in their introduction as “a group embedded in Iran’s proxy network.” That is how the editors describe the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood when they would rather not discuss the Brotherhood, or the emirate that has housed its political bureau since 2012, or the NATO ally whose president called its killers “mujahideen” 18 days after October 7.
Hamas appears 76 times, and the editors define it in their introduction as “a group embedded in Iran’s proxy network.” That is how the editors describe the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood when they would rather not discuss the Brotherhood.
The book’s own contributors know better. Peter Bergen and David Sterman write, in the same volume, that Iran and its proxies appear to have judged that “a full-on confrontation with Israel of the kind Hamas launched would not succeed.” A proxy does not have to persuade its principal to join its war. Hamas planned October 7 on its own authority, with patrons of its own choosing. Name them and the book’s architecture collapses.
Nor can the calendar excuse the silence. The book cites sources as late as August 5, 2026. On January 13 of this year the State Department designated the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, while the Treasury designated the Egyptian and Jordanian chapters “for providing material support to Hamas.” On March 12 the Treasury sanctioned a Turkey-based charity it called “an operational headquarters, banking and financial hub for the Muslim Brotherhood.” On July 23 it sanctioned a Turkey-based trading company that “has transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hamas.” Brian Michael Jenkins’s chapter footnotes the State Department’s terrorist list “accessed August 5, 2026.” The Lebanese Brotherhood was on that list. The book never mentions it.
What the book does discuss is America. The preface says the United States “inadvertently served Osama bin Laden’s ends more than its own.” The introduction refers to “Israeli violence in Gaza and the West Bank.” Daniel Byman’s chapter argues that 9/11 was an “outlier,” that the errors after it “encouraged costly overreaction,” and that the lesson is “calibration.” The closing chapter names the White House counterterrorism adviser and a Pentagon appointee’s January 6 conviction. In the body text, “Trump” appears a dozen times. “Qatar,” three.
The errors are the kind a book acquires when it is edited to a thesis rather than to the facts. Jenkins’s account of the 2003 Iraq coalition implies 10 signatories of the “letter of eight.” Don Rassler counts “more than 25” cartels and gangs designated as terrorist organizations; the State Department’s list, as of this writing, shows 20. Assaf Moghadam writes that “approximately 70 nationalities” were represented among the October 7 dead; the United Nations commission he cites counted 68 foreign nationals, not 70 nationalities. Asked about it, Moghadam accepted the correction, adding “thanks for catching that.” Aaron Zelin reports an Islamic State ambush near Palmyra that “killed three American soldiers”; Central Command counted two soldiers and a civilian interpreter, and the dead deserve to be counted correctly. Zelin also attributes to a United Nations report a headline figure, 25,000 al-Qaeda fighters against 500 in 2001, that appears nowhere in the report.
The book is not a lapse. It is the Center’s record. This author reviewed every passage the Center and its scholars have published about Qatar: 797 on the Center’s website since 2011, and 392 more in the scholars’ outside writing, in archived Soufan Group briefs, and in the Center’s 138 long-form reports. Each passage was sorted two ways: whether the Center was speaking for itself or quoting someone else, and whether it judged Qatar or only stated a fact about it. In 15 years the Center has never, in its own voice, said that Qatar finances terrorism. Of the 797 website passages, five criticize Qatar for anything at all, and the sharpest of the five calls a 2015 interview on Al Jazeera, Qatar’s state broadcaster, “essentially an infomercial for the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.” Another 39 say, without judgment, that Qatar supports or has ties to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Syrian rebels, the Taliban, or Iran; 17 of them state that support flatly. Noting that Qatar backs the Brotherhood is not the same as faulting it for doing so. The charge of terror finance appears in ten passages, and in every one of them it is something the Saudis, the Israelis, or American officials allege. Several of those passages go on to explain the allegation away.
Through 2017, one website passage in seven that mentioned Qatar criticized it or attributed support for Islamists to it; from 2018 on, one in 33 did so, and none were critical. Favorable passages went the other way, from four to 51.
The record has a date. Through 2017, one website passage in seven that mentioned Qatar criticized it or attributed support for Islamists to it; from 2018 on, one in 33 did so, and none were critical. Favorable passages went the other way, from four to 51. In 2018 the Center began holding its Global Security Forum in Doha, co-organized with the Qatar International Academy for Security Studies. The bluntest thing the Soufan Group wrote about Qatar, in everything this author could find, is not on the Center’s site. It survives in the Internet Archive: a July 8, 2013, brief that said “Doha engaged an array of US adversaries, to include Iran, Sudan, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Somali militants of al Shabaab.” The Center’s website carries nothing dated 2013 at all.
The scholars follow the institution. Colin Clarke, the volume’s co-editor, told Voice of America in 2014 that Qatar was “another country active in this funding” of radical groups, and wrote in 2015 of “a form of passive support for ISIS” by Gulf states “with notoriously loose financial regulations (e.g., Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE).” That was at RAND. The only stand-alone article on Qatar of his that this author could find, published in Lawfare on August 17, 2018, the year he left RAND, called the Saudi campaign against Qatar “a feckless attempt to bully and intimidate Doha” and Qatar a “stalwart U.S. ally.” He was a Soufan Center senior research fellow by early 2019, became the Soufan Group’s director of policy and research in January 2021, and was appointed the Center’s executive director in October 2025. In those years this author found nothing critical of Qatar from him. The Qataris “have earned a reputation as honest brokers,” he told AFP in 2021, and Doha “has grown into the Geneva of the Middle East.” In April 2025, on the sidelines of the forum in Doha, he told The Peninsula, a Qatari daily: “From Chad to Gaza to Ukraine, Qatari negotiators and mediators are involved in intensive diplomacy aimed at working to wind down wars and insurgencies.”
Kenneth Katzman’s Congressional Research Service report on Qatar records that “at least one high-ranking Qatari official provided support to Al Qaeda figures” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Now a senior fellow at the Center, he told the Qatar News Agency in 2023, in the agency’s words, that Qatar “has become a pivotal country … and a close partner of the United States.” No critical word about Qatar by Ali Soufan is on the record that this author could find; he has thanked “the State of Qatar for allowing us to host GSF in Doha.”
Then there is the money. The Soufan Center’s audited financial statements for 2024, on file with the New York Attorney General, record an agreement with that same academy under which the Center receives “an annual fee of $500,000” for “an unspecified period of time.” That was 48 percent of the Center’s revenue that year, and the statements add that “100% of its program service fees revenue” came “from one donor.” The academy was headed, according to Qatar’s foreign ministry, by Majed al-Ansari, the man the ministry was appointing as its official spokesman. Ali Soufan “serves as the Executive Director” of that academy, according to his own firm, which calls it “our flagship training facility.” The Center’s donation page says: “Unlike many organizations, we do not accept donations from any foreign governments.”
This author does not claim that any contributor wrote to order; the co-editor himself once wrote that Erdoğan’s tolerance of Islamic State fighters “amounts to passive support and tacit approval.” The claim here is larger and worse. Qatar’s spending in Washington is usually described as lobbying: firms on retainer, filings at the Justice Department, a campaign to sway decision-makers of the kind its minister of state for defense affairs once tweeted about. This is something else. The founder of an American counterterrorism center is the executive director of a Qatari academy that the Center’s own forum report and Qatar’s foreign ministry both identify as headed by the ministry’s spokesman. In 2024 that academy paid his center a fee equal to nearly half its revenue, under an agreement of unspecified duration. The center’s flagship event meets in Doha, co-organized with the academy and held, in the words of Qatar’s state news agency, “under the patronage of” Qatar’s prime minister. A senior fellow has praised the partnership to the Qatar News Agency. On this author’s review, its analysis has not criticized Doha in its own voice since 2015, and its 9/11 book never treats the state that shelters Hamas as a subject. The word for that is not influence; it is capture.
On this author’s review, its analysis has not criticized Doha in its own voice since 2015, and its 9/11 book never treats the state that shelters Hamas as a subject. The word for that is not influence; it is capture.
And al-Ansari, the academy’s president in the Center’s own forum report, told a forum in Abu Dhabi on September 7 that “having a strategic alliance with the US, is very important but is not enough. Self-sufficiency when it comes to security is the only way forward.” A state building its own security self-sufficiency has, through that academy, put an American institution that speaks with authority about terrorism on a $500,000-a-year fee agreement of unspecified duration. It published a book on the future of the jihadi movement in which the state that hosts that movement’s political leadership is never a subject, and it did not tell its readers about the money. None of its 138 reports contains a critical sentence about Qatar either. In any other field that would be called a conflict of interest and disclosed on the first page. Here it went unmentioned.
One contributor has a particular reason to ask about the money. Assaf Moghadam was named this month executive director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Herzliya, effective October 1. The incoming head of Israel’s best-known counterterrorism institute published, under the imprint of a center that drew nearly half its revenue from a Doha academy tied to the state that shelters Hamas’s leadership, a chapter in which Qatar appears once, inside a parenthesis. This author put the question to him on September 7: was he told, before or after he wrote his chapter, that the Center had a fee agreement with the academy? His reply, apart from accepting the correction to his chapter, was one sentence: “On the other points you raise, I have no comment.” Whether the Center told its contributors about the money remains a question he is now well placed to put to it, and to answer in public.
The Center, Ali Soufan, Colin Clarke, and Kenneth Katzman were given the same opportunity. On September 7 this author sent each of them a request for comment setting out every statement above with its source and inviting corrections. The Center and Ali Soufan were asked, among other things, whether the academy’s fee agreement is still in force, what the Center provides under it, whether he still directs the academy, and whether the volume’s contributors were told about it; Clarke was asked whether he had been told. The Center’s letter, and those for Clarke and Katzman, went to the Center’s press office; Ali Soufan’s went to the Soufan Group’s chief of staff. The deadline was 5 p.m. Eastern time on September 9. None of the four responded by then.
Qatar’s leaders are candid about what they want from Washington. Years before Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani became the emirate’s deputy prime minister and minister of state for defense affairs in November 2024, he posted, in MEMRI’s translation: “Israel’s control of the U.S. is clear. We must plan how to influence the decision-makers in the U.S.” When a follower wished it were that easy, he answered: “With correct planning and a strong will, everything is possible.” In 2014, according to MEMRI’s record of his since-deleted posts, he tweeted under the hashtag “We Are All Hamas.” Hamad bin Jassim, prime minister until 2013, told a Kuwaiti interviewer in 2022, again in MEMRI’s translation: “We had journalists on our payroll,” adding, “Some of them have become MPs now.” On Qatari television in 2017, in remarks reported by Middle East Eye, he had already conceded that with al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch “maybe there was” a relationship. Al-Ansari, the academy president turned foreign ministry spokesman, insists that Qatar’s reconstruction and humanitarian spending in Gaza was “carried out in full coordination with Israel, the US, Egypt, the United Nations, and all concerned parties.” And the emir told his Shura Council 17 days after October 7 that “it is untenable for Israel to be given an unconditional green light and free license to kill.”
A book that promises to assess the jihadi movement “on the evidence” should be able to say the word Qatar. This one could not. Readers should ask why. This author did, and the Center did not answer.
Its diplomats are candid about compliance too, and about critics. Qatar’s deputy chief of mission in Washington, Hamad Al-Muftah, posted on September 3 that his government is “compliant” with FARA “filings and transparency,” adding: “Unlike many, Qatar doesn’t hide its work through domestic groups. We comply with American laws.” Neither the Soufan Center nor the academy appears on the Justice Department’s FARA registrant lists, and the fee surfaced only in an audited statement filed with a state charities regulator. Two days later, after this author quoted a chart of his that casts several of Qatar’s critics as a “coordinated disinformation campaign,” Al-Muftah posted again, tagging the Justice Department and the State Department’s Near East bureau: “I think I know why he is nervous.” That is how the emirate’s second-ranking diplomat in Washington answers a critic: by tagging two federal agencies.
The lesson of 25 years is not “calibration.” Terrorist movements are not managed into quiescence. They are defeated, and they are defeated by confronting the states that pay for them, shelter their leaders, broadcast their clerics, and launder their money. Al-Qaeda’s Gulf donor networks did not fade on their own; a decade of Treasury designations choked them. The Islamic State’s pipeline through Turkey did not narrow by itself; Ankara narrowed it under sustained American pressure. Hamas’s investment portfolio did not expose itself. Where the patrons persist, the movement persists. The Soufan volume forecasts the movement’s future while refusing to name the variable that determines it.
Three things follow. Qatar’s Major Non-NATO Ally status, and the security guarantee it received by executive order last September, should be conditioned on the permanent closure of Hamas’s political presence in Doha and on prosecutions, not acquittals, of Treasury-designated financiers. Mediation is not immunity. Turkey should be treated in American strategy as a problem to be solved, not a partner to be spared analysis. And research institutes that take a material share of their revenue from an interested foreign state should meet the disclosure standard now enforced on universities, whose disclosures for 2025 put Qatar first among their foreign funders, at more than $1.1 billion.
A book that promises to assess the jihadi movement “on the evidence” should be able to say the word Qatar. This one could not. Readers should ask why. This author did, and the Center did not answer.
