Matt Bevan

With implicit Western backing, Qatar hosted officers of the Taliban, financiers of al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and rebel factions from all over Africa.

All of this just a few kilometres from the regional headquarters of US Central Command.

It is a very small country, after all.

Now, not everyone was a fan of this.

It's small world style politics.

And Qatar was publicly criticized for trying to bring these groups together, particularly by Israel and its supporters.

It is quite strange that the Emir of Qatar should take sides with Hamas.

I blame Qatar, that very rich emirate that's been pouring money into the hands of Hamas.

Despite publicly disagreeing with what Qatar was doing, behind the scenes, the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu was supportive of it.

Netanyahu allowed Qatar to give massive amounts of cash to Hamas in Gaza.

Qatar electronically transfers cash to Israel that cash is then physically carried over the border by UN officials and by Israeli officials into Gaza.

It was a divide and conquer strategy.

with Netanyahu hoping Hamas would weaken the more moderate Palestinian Authority.

So there's money flowing in all sorts of directions for all sorts of reasons and Qatar wanted to be at the centre of it.

Having a diplomatic and financial relationship with everybody means nobody will want to attack you.

Simple.

Over the last 50 years, Qatar has grown from being a strange barren peninsula with no fun facts, to being home to the richest citizen population on earth, to being the center of an enormous intricate spider web, which stretched into the business, economic, journalistic, tourism, cultural, energy, and political worlds.

But Hamad, and after his abdication in 2013, his son Tamim, didn't do all this for fun or for ego or for glory.

It was a long-term strategy of making Qatar a significant player in world affairs.

If they were at the centre of the web, they would be too important to mess with.