Ethiopia broke its official ties with Qatar this week, accusing the Persian Gulf emirate of fomenting terrorism in the Horn of Africa, calling it a terrorism supporter. Qatar responded by announcing its surprise.

Specifically, Ethiopia's foreign ministry accused Qatar of supporting terrorist groups in Eritrea, with which Ethiopia is effectively at war. It is true that Qatar has good relations with Eritrea. In 2002, Qatar signed with Eritrea. A positive meeting between the two nations' foreign ministers in March, 2008 confirmed ongoing good relations.

One of the groups to which Ethiopia refers is the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The ONLF is an Ethiopian insurgent group of ethnic Somalis that receives arms and funding funneled through Eritrea. One of Ethiopia's reasons for cutting off relations with Qatar relates to a program about Ogaden produced by al-Jazeera, the Qatar based and partly Qatari owned television network. (Part of the program is available in English translation . The ONLF has put out a statement condemning Ethiopia, which it claims is in the midst of a genocide against the Ogaden. Ethiopia considers the ONLF a terrorist group.

As for whether Qatar is funding terrorism, the answer is that Qatari funds may be ending up in rebel pockets:

According to the BBC's Elizabeth Blunt in Addis Ababa, Foreign Ministry sources say that the Ethiopian government believes Qatar is giving substantial sums of money - amounting to something like $150,000 a month - to Eritrea, which then go on to fund insurgents in Ethiopia's Somali region, the Ogaden National Liberation Front.

The primary reason for Ethiopia's move does appear to be its anger over the al Jazeera program. The gesture, a small one, is likely to be welcomed by the United States which was not long ago still calling al Jazeera a propaganda outlet. More important, the US backs Ethiopia's actions that undermine Eritrean-supported armed Somali Islamists in Somalia. It recently declared al Shabab, the armed wing of the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia, to be a terrorist group.