Qatari leaders affirmed that the fight against extremist groups such as Daesh cannot be won by military force alone. In November 2015, at a meeting of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) interior ministers in Doha, Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani called on the country’s spiritual leaders to “immunize” youth against “ideological extremism.”
Sheikh Abdullah, who also serves as Qatar’s prime minister, stated that ideology and faith should be used to fight “ideological extremism and dry up its sources in order to immunize our people, especially the youth, against misleading and mistaken ideologies being spread by terrorist groups in the name of Islam and which have no relation to our Islamic religion.”
Recent attacks in Lebanon and France, for which Daesh claims responsibility, have helped clarify the threat posed by the extremist group.
Sheikh Abdullah said the region’s “foremost” security challenge is the escalation of terrorist attacks. He added that fighting terrorism must include “joint action” among GCC security forces and tackling the “root causes, whether political, social, religious, sectarian or others.”
Qatar’s emir expressed the same thought earlier in the year in an opinion article in The New York Times. His Royal Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani argued that understanding and confronting the root causes of terrorism are key to tackling its prevalence, and that the war could not be won with “bullets and bombs” alone.