trusted operatives. Belhajd had fought in Afghanistan and contributed to the growth of al-Qaeda in the country. Burr claims that Belhadj had followed Osama bin-Laden moving al-Qaeda's headquarters from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996. In 2004 Belhadj was arrested by Malaysian officials upon his arrival at the Kuala Lumpur airport, sent to Thailand upon extraordinary rendition on behalf of the U.S. and then sent back to Libya, where he was detained in harsh conditions for 6 years. In 2009 Al-Sallabi began acting as a mediator in negotiations between the Gaddafi government and the LIFG (whose members were in prison). However, J. Millard Burr, a senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy, reported that Sallabi became involved with Col. Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, in a Qatar-backed series of negotiations that aimed at having Islamist prisoners released from Libyan prisons during his time in Qatar. By 2006, "more than one hundred Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] members were released," and "by 2008 hundreds of members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group had also been freed." According to Burr, Belhaji himself was freed from prison in Libya in an amnesty negotiated by Gaddafi's son in 2010. During Libyan Revolution of 2011 During the Libyan Revolution of 2011 Sallabi was Qatar's main distributor of the Qatari government's military, humanitarian and cash aid to the Libyan rebels and much of this aid ended up in the hands of Islamists like Belhadj who commanded a rebel group in Libya's western mountains and Sallabi's brother Ismail, who commanded a rebel group from Benghazi. As he told reporters later on, Sallabi had asked Qatar's assistance during the initial phase of the revolution. Sallabi acted as the key conduit to deliver Qatar's $2 billion aid through over a dozen shipments of "humanitarian aid, money, and arms" to the rebels. In October 2011, the international relations expert Daniel Wagner described Sallabi as Libya's most influential politician. However, The Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher reported that this privileged relationship with the Qatari rulers, that facilitated Qatar's role in ousting Gaddafi, also raised "suspicions among some Libyans about the gulf state's motives." Overall, Qatar provided Libyan rebels with "tens of millions of dollars in aid, military training and more than 20,000 tons of weapons." Following the Libyan Civil War of 2011 In November 2011, after the death of Gaddafi, al-Sallabi announced the formation of the National Gathering for Freedom, Justice and Development,