The Pearl Of The Gulf

Qatar! The richest country in the world, and home to over 50,000 millionaires.

I just finished a 10 day vacation in the beautiful city of Doha, the capital city of Qatar. I knew very little of this place before i arrived, but my cousin picked me up from the airport and filled me in on the necessities right away. Since the summer of 2017, they've been hit with an embargo and it's neighboring countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, and Egypt. One of the most important features of this is that flight are not allowed from these countries, or over their airspace, and furthermore, their one border to Saudi Arabia is closed off. This can make travel very difficult and a bit longer for most as they would have to fly around the airspace of most neighboring countries.
I remember hearing a little about this embargo the year before, but not much. From what i recall, their news station, Al Jazeera, was accused of supporting terrorism, so the other gulf countries, and America decided they want nothing to do with them. But the word on the street was much different, in fact they did not mention the Al Jazeera scandal at all. My cousin and a few of his local friends explained it to me like this: Saudi Arabia has been very jealous of Qatar, their growing economy and their overall influence on the rest of the gulf countries. Qatar has the largest US military base in the middle east, they are hosting the 2020 world cup in Doha, they have good relations with Iran, they control the largest news outlet in the middle east, and they are far from finishing expansion as they have an unlimited amount of natural gas and resources. A scandal was created claiming that Qatar supports terrorism and America was pulled into the mix. Trump decided to pull out all of the military forces in Qatar, which was around 10,000 U.S. soldiers. All of Qatars neighboring countries had stopped all importing of goods into the country at an attempt to shake up the economy of Qatar. The King of Qatar knew he had to act fast as the country feared of an invasion. Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the King of Qatar, called on his biggest allies in Iran and Turkey and had new militaries flown in and setup as soon as possible. They also imported all kinds of goods and necessities from it's allies in order to not be effected by the blockade of so many goods through their neighboring countries. At this point the GCC countries and the United States did not want to mess with Qatar because if they did, then they'd essentially be messing with all of it's allies now too. So the other gulf countries backed down. It's almost been a year since the embargo began, but they say that Qatar has flourished from these sanctions while the rest of the gulf countries have suffered without the richest country in the world not buying up their goods and resources anymore. The embargo is expected to be lifted within the next few months, but only time will tell.