US uses Qatar, UAE as surrogates in its ‘regime change’ bids

The US government has secretly used two Persian Gulf states of Qatar and United Arab Emirates (UAE) to ship weapons to rebel groups in Libya and Syria in efforts to help overthrow their governments.

“Relying on surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operation, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests,” leading US daily The New York Times reports Thursday, noting growing worries in Washington that the two despotic Arab regimes have also given arms to “radical jihadist” groups, in Libya and now in Syria, unfriendly to the United States.
According to the report, amid Washington worries that weapon shipments to Libya through their Arab surrogates in the Persian Gulf may have ended up in the hands of groups that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, last September, including its ambassador to the country, the Obama administration is now considering “whether to play a direct role in arming rebels in Syria, where weapons are flowing in from Qatar and other [US-backed] countries.”

The report cites unnamed US officials as saying that the Obama administration “has never determined where all of the weapons, paid by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, went inside Libya,” adding that Qatar has shipped “small arms” to Libya by air and sea, “for which it has demanded reimbursement from Libya’s new government.”