Qatar will build an air force facility at a US military base in Idaho to host its F-15 fighter jets and to train pilots, according to an agreement signed Friday between US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his visiting Qatari counterpart.
The agreement represented the further warming of ties between Washington and Doha and came less than two weeks after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order committing the US to defend Qatar if it came under attack.
Just over a month ago, such an attack unfolded when Israel fired missiles into Doha, targeting Hamas’s top leaders as they huddled to discuss the latest ceasefire proposal.
The strike failed to kill any of Hamas’s top leadership and ended up galvanizing the entire Arab world around Doha’s calls for the US to rein in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Several weeks later, Trump had the Israeli premier apologize to his Qatari counterpart in the Oval Office, handing him a scripted apology that Netanyahu was coaxed into reading.
“Today, we’re announcing a letter of acceptance in building a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho,” Hegseth said during a signing ceremony at the Pentagon.
The base “will be host to a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots to enhance our combined training, increase lethality, interoperability,” Hegseth added. “It’s just another example of our partnership.”
Hegseth also thanked Doha for its involvement in reaching the recent ceasefire hostage-release deal between Israel and Hamas, in negotiations facilitated by Qatar alongside the US and Egypt in Sharm el-Sheikh this week. Trump announced Wednesday that Israel and Hamas had agreed to the first phase of a ceasefire hostage-release deal.
“No one other than President Trump could have achieved the peace — what we believe will be a lasting peace — in Gaza, and Qatar played a substantial role from the beginning, working with our folks to make sure that came about,” Hegseth said.
Qatar submitted a $12 billion order for 36 F-15s in 2017, and the facility will allow its pilots to train on the planes, given that the Gulf country’s own airspace is limited.
While giving a foreign country such access to US military facilities is rare, the agreement had been in the works for several years, Axios reported.
Qatar’s image has been tarred in Washington and Jerusalem over its hosting of Hamas leaders and years of funding to Gaza, which critics say allowed Hamas to build up its terror infrastructure throughout the Strip.
Doha retorts that Israel and the US had asked it to host Hamas’s leaders, rather than having them based in a country less aligned to the West. Moreover, Qatar maintains that the funds it transferred to Gaza came at the behest of repeated governments headed by Netanyahu.
Netanyahu has defended the payments, arguing that they largely went toward preventing a humanitarian crisis, rather than military purposes. But his critics say the funds were aimed at bolstering Hamas at the expense of the more moderate Palestinian Authority, keeping the two divided and limiting chances for a unified Palestinian leadership that could advance a two-state solution.