On the morning of 16 December 2015 Qatar's ruling family got bad news: 28 members of a royal hunting party had been kidnapped in Iraq.
A list of the hostages was given to Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, who was about to become Qatar's foreign minister. He realised that it included two of his own relatives.
“Jassim is my cousin and Khaled is my aunt's husband,” he texted Qatar's ambassador to Iraq, Zayed al-Khayareen. “May God protect you: once you receive any news, update me immediately.”
The two men would spend the next 16 months consumed by the hostage crisis.
In one version of events, they would pay more than a billion dollars to free the men. The money would go to groups and individuals labelled “terrorists” by the US: Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, which killed American troops with roadside bombs; General Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force and personally subject to US and EU sanctions; and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, once known as al-Nusra Front, when it was an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
