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Gulf crisis Qatar Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries that have broken off relations with Qatar have issued a list of demands to end a diplomatic crisis in the region, reports say. Their conditions include shutting down Al-Jazeera.

The 13-point list of demands was delivered overnight by Kuwait, which is mediating between Qatar and its neighbors on Friday.

The situation between Qatar and several Arab countries deteriorated earlier this month after Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain cut ties to Qatar over allegations the country funds terrorism. The dispute plunged Qatar into chaos and ignited the biggest diplomatic crisis in the Gulf since the 1991 war against Iraq.

Those four countries have now given Qatar 10 days to comply with all of the demands. The Associated Press, which obtained a copy of the list, reported that one of the demands called for Qatar to sever its diplomatic ties to Iran. The list also contained demands that Qatar close down a Turkish military base on its territory and shut down Doha-based broadcaster Al-Jazeera.

Quoting sources, Al-Jazeera reported that a list had been delivered to Qatar, but the broadcaster did not elaborate on its contents.

Doha has denied financing extremism. However, it remains a key patron of the Islamic Hamas movement, which rules the Gaza Strip, and is also seen to support the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni political group that is opposed to monarchical rule, as is practiced in many nations of the Middle East.

Strict conditions

The list said Qatar owed an unspecified sum in compensation and demanded the Gulf country to cut all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups including Hezbollah, al-Qaida and the self-styled “Islamic State.”

According to the list, Qatar must refuse to naturalize citizens from the four countries and expel those currently in Qatar. It must also deliver individuals accused of terrorism in those four countries and stop funding groups that are designated as terrorist by the United States.

Earlier this week, the United States urged Qatar’s neighbors to come up with a list of demands that was “reasonable and actionable.”

If Qatar agrees to comply, The Associated Press reported, it will be audited once a month for the first year, and monitored regularly over the next 10 years. Qatar’s government did not have any immediate response to the demands.

Turkey: No plans to shut Qatar base

Turkish Defense Minister Fikri Isik told local broadcaster NTV on Friday that his country had no plans to review its military base in Qatar and dismissed demands for its closure as interferences in Ankara’s relations with the oil-rich Gulf state.

“The base in Qatar is both a Turkish base and one that will preserve the security of Qatar and the region,” said Isik.

On Thursday Turkey sent a small contingent of soldiers and armored vehicles to Qatar, after a fast-tracked legislative change allowed for more troops to be deployed there.

Turkey has been one of Qatar’s key backers during the crisis. Also on Thursday, it sent its first shipment of food aid to the country. Turkey had already sent more than 100 cargo planes with supplies, but Turkish Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci said maintaining an airlift was not a sustainable solution.

Overall, Turkish exports to the Gulf state have tripled from their normal levels in the three weeks since the embargo began.

Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held talks with Saudi leaders on how to calm tensions and come to a diplomatic solution.

Kosovo, a predominantly Muslim land severed from Serbia by US and NATO military intervention, was turned into a hotbed of radical Islamism and a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists thanks to money pumped into it by Gulf kingdoms, the New York Times reported.

Among all European nations Kosovo holds the grim record of having the biggest per capita rate of people joining the terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Syria. In a land of 1.8 million, 314 Kosovars were identified by the police over the past two years as IS recruits.

Local authorities and moderate imams blame the problem on a network of extremist clerics backed by money coming from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and other Arab nations. Funded through a shady network of private donations, mercurial charities and Islamic scholarship programs, they spread the brand of Islam called Wahhabism, a hardline sect to which Saudi Arabia adheres.

“The first thing the Wahhabis do is to take members of our congregation, who understand Islam in the traditional Kosovo way that we had for generations, and try to draw them away from this understanding,” Idriz Bilalli, an imam of the central mosque in Podujevo, told NYT. “Once they get them away from the traditional congregation, then they start bombarding them with radical thoughts and ideas.”

“The main goal of their activity is to create conflict between people,” he added. “This first creates division, and then hatred, and then it can come to what happened in Arab countries, where war starts because of these conflicting ideas.”

Wahhabism tenets include the supremacy of Sharia law, the idea of violent jihad and takfirism, which encourages killing of Muslims considered heretics for not following its interpretation of Islam. Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, states that it is a secular country in its constitution. Kosovars are predominantly Albanian Muslims who adhere to the moderate Hanafi school of Islam inherited from the five centuries of Ottoman rule.

Saudi charities and preachers flooded Kosovo after the Balkan wars, offering money to build mosques and help the poor in exchange for following stricter everyday norms such as wearing head scarves.

“They came in the name of aid,” Enver Rexhepi, a moderate imam in Gjilan, said of the Arab charities in an interview with the newspaper. “But they came with a background of different intentions, and that’s where the Islamic religion started splitting here.”

“I spent 10 years in Arab countries and specialized in sectarianism within Islam,” he added. “It’s very important to stop Arab sectarianism from being introduced to Kosovo.”

For some moderates like Rexhepi opposing the spread of Wahhabism meant trouble. In 2004, he clashed with young radical preacher Zekirja Qazimi over an Albanian flag displayed in Rexhepi’s mosque. The flag features a double-headed eagle. Wahhabism considers depictions of living things idolatrous, so Qazimi tore the flag down. Rexhepi put it back.

Within days Rexhepi was abducted and savagely beaten by masked men in the woods above Gjilan, he told NYT. He believes Qazimi was behind the attack, but the police investigation went nowhere.

In 2014, after two young Kosovars blew themselves up in Iraq and Turkey, Kosovo authorities launched an investigation into their radicalization. This month Qazimi was sentenced to 10 years for inciting hatred and recruiting for a terrorist organization, an accusation that dozens of other clerics and charity workers faced. The broad investigation in Kosovo resulted in 67 people charged, 14 imams arrested and 19 Muslim organization shut down by the police.

Investigators say Saudi sponsors invest millions of dollars in spreading Wahhabism in the Balkans. Al Waqf al Islami, one of the organizations shut down, pumped in € 10 million from 2000 through 2012. Of this money, more than € 1 million went into mosque building. Some € 1.5 million vanished through unspecified cash withdrawals that the police could not trace. Only seven percent of the organization’s budget went to caring for orphans, the charity’s stated mission.

Kosovo Central Bank figures show grants from Saudi Arabia averaging €100,000 a year for the past five years. The funding from Riyadh has been slowly reducing lately, with Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates stepping in, the report said.

The radicalization in Kosovo didn’t come as a surprise to local authorities, the newspaper said. As early as 2004, then-Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi tried to ban extremist sects. But he said the draft law was spoken against by European officials, who said it would violate religious freedoms.

“It was not in their interest, they did not want to irritate some Islamic countries,” he said. “They simply did not do anything.”

Now the Wahhabi agenda is shared by some to Kosovar officials, Interior Minister Skender Hyseni told the NYT.

“I told them they were doing a great disservice to their country,” he said in an interview. “Kosovo is by definition, by Constitution, a secular society. There has always been historically an unspoken interreligious tolerance among Albanians here, and we want to make sure that we keep it that way.”

Kosovo, originally a predominantly Serbian land that preserves a strong spiritual significance for Serbs to this day, has undergone dramatic demographical changes over the past centuries. By the late 1940s it was split in virtually equal parts between Serbs and Albanians, and the proportion continued to change.

In 1990s, the Balkans went through a period of brutal ethnic wars, and Kosovo saw its share of bloodshed. NATO used its military superiority to crush Serbian forces and ensure Kosovo’s independence from Belgrade. Former US President Bill Clinton and his wife, US senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, are praised in Kosovo for their support of the Albanian cause.