DOHA, 7 March 2003 — Qatar has openly acknowledged it has offered facilities to US military forces that could be used in an attack on Iraq, even though it is on record as opposing such a campaign.

There are now an estimated 7,000 US service personnel in this tiny and vulnerable emirate, most of them assigned to Al-Udaid Air Base southwest of Doha.

At another base outside the capital, As-Sayliyah, US military planners are establishing a forward command center that would direct any attack on Iraq.

In recent months, US C-130 aircraft have been taking off from Qatar to drop anti-Saddam propaganda leaflets over Iraq and to broadcast similar radio messages to Iraqi listeners, according to a US military official here. He would not confirm the point of departure of the aircraft but travelers coming through Doha International Airport have reported seeing large military planes with US markings parked there.

Qatar is not alone among regional Arab states that have allowed the US military to operate on their territory, as Washington has access to facilities in Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. Each of those states has likewise signed on to recent resolutions adopted by the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference rejecting any US and British assault on Iraq and urging that the weapons crisis be resolved through the United Nations.

Resolutions recently adopted by both bodies implicitly make a distinction between merely offering facilities to the United States and allowing those installations to be used in an attack on Baghdad, reflecting deeply felt regional sensitivities about US forces on sovereign Arab soil.

Qatar in fact argues that it has not been officially asked by the United States for permission to use As-Sayliyah as a nerve center for an invasion of Iraq, since no formal decision to go to war has been taken by Washington.

Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad ibn Jassem ibn Jaber Al-Thani, addressing a press conference on Wednesday following an OIC summit here, said US forces are in Qatar under the terms of a 1991 agreement.

When and if the Qatari government is asked for authorization to use the bases against Iraq, Sheikh Hamad said, “We (will) have to take into consideration that the United States is a very close ally and a very close friend to Qatar.”

But Sheikh Hamad, seen as representing a new wave of frank-talking Arab diplomats, chided some of Qatar’s fellow Gulf states for an absence of transparency on the presence of US military facilities in the region.

“All of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) states are giving facilities to the United States, and one of them is Qatar,” he said. “So we cannot say we are not giving facilities.”

Elsewhere in the region, he added, “some say ‘We have no military bases,’ others say ‘We don’t have a single American soldier’ and there are those who say ‘I will never authorize’ (US military activities). All these are word games. We are fooling our people and it is because of that that we have problems with them. If we don’t want to have problems we must be honest with them and speak to them frankly about what we can do and what we cannot do.”

Qatari political analysts have said the country, controlling the world’s third largest natural gas reserves in a highly volatile region, has no choice but to seek the security of a US military umbrella.

“We in Qatar need a foreign presence and the people know it,” Sheikh Hamad maintained. “That’s why I don’t lie to them, saying we don’t have any bases.”