Qatar’s Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani conducted a surprise visit to Sudan, where he met on Sunday with President Omar Al-Bashir and Foreign Minister Ibrahim Ghandour. While the Sudanese and Qatari sides did not disclose the content of a verbal message conveyed by the Qatari minister to Al-Bashir, Ghandour said, during a joint news conference, that the two countries have agreed to establish a joint political negotiations committee, which would convene every six months to discuss bilateral relations. Abdulrahman Al Thani said that he conveyed an oral message from the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, to Al-Bashir, without elaborating. “It speaks of bilateral relations and means to strengthen them,” he stated. The Qatari official said that he tackled with his Sudanese counterpart “joint projects and the mechanism of expanding cooperation to a wider horizon,” in addition to discussing the outcome of the Doha agreement and following up the peace process in Darfur. Al-Thani’s current visit is the first by a Qatari senior official to Sudan, since the outbreak of the crisis between Qatar and the Gulf States and Egypt, during which the Sudanese government adopted the Kuwaiti initiative to resolve the dispute between the Arab Quartet and Doha.