Saudi Arabia will reopen borders with Qatar after three years of blockade, says Kuwait

After setting up a blockade against Qatar in 2017, Saudi Arabia would reopen its borders and airspace with Qatar, says Kuwait's foreign minister

After a rift that has fractured the Arab world and tested US diplomacy for more than three years, Saudi Arabia was set to reopen borders and airspace to Qatar on Monday night after boycotting it since 2017, Kuwait’s foreign minister announced Monday.

The announcement could be a first step toward ending Qatar’s isolation from its Arab neighbours, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt.

The opening, announced the day before a summit of Gulf countries in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, would allow for commerce and travel between Qatar and the kingdom for the first time since the four countries blockaded Qatar in June 2017, accusing its rulers of supporting terrorism and Islamics in the region, and of getting too close to Iran, their enemy.

But little has changed since 2017 to address the complaints of Saudi Arabia and its allies about Qatar, raising the question of what the boycott accomplished — and whether any solution that failed to resolve the underlying disputes would last.

In Washington, the announcement was seen as good news. Arriving during the transition from one US president to another, the deal sits at a rare overlap of interests for President Donald Trump, whose administration has been urging its allies to stop quarrelling and unify against Iran, and President-elect Joe Biden, whose team would prefer not to inherit a crisis centred on one of the globe’s most strategic regions.

Kuwait’s foreign minister, Sheikh Ahmad Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah, said there had been an agreement between Saudi Arabi and Qatar, which he said would be a “new page in brotherly relations.”

Officials from Saudi Arabia and Qatar did not immediately confirm that there was an agreement between the two countries.

The Gulf countries’ decision in 2017 to cut ties with Qatar, severing diplomatic relations and suspending land, air and sea travel, forced the tiny monarchy into immediate crisis. Trade and commerce that used to flow smoothly around the Gulf fell apart, and thousands of people had to leave their homes practically overnight to return to their countries.