Al-Qaida funding crackdown ‘failing’

Key financiers of al-Qaida are still in business despite a global, post-9-11 crackdown on funding for terrorists, according to an investigation by the United Nations group monitoring international sanctions on al-Qaida and the Taliban.

“Al-Qaida, the Taliban and those associated with the network are still able to obtain, solicit, collect, transfer and distribute considerable sums,” reads a new report from the U.N. group leaked to the London Financial Times.

The report warns the crackdown has failed because of legal loopholes and a lack of international cooperation and political will.

The analysis traces the recent activities of Youssef Nada and Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, directors of a financial group known as al-Taqwa, and reveals the men continue to operate businesses in several European countries even though both have been named as terrorist financiers by the U.S and the U.N.

The U.N. designation requires member countries to shut down the men’s financial and commercial operations.

While the bank accounts of both men and of the al-Taqwa entities have been frozen, “nothing has been done with respect to any of their other physical or business assets,” states the report, according to the Financial Times, noting the men still have commercial property interests in Italy and possibly Switzerland, as well as residences in Lugano and Italy.

The news reportedly shocked Jonathan Winer, a former senior State Department official and expert on terror financing.

“Their business activities are supposed to be shut down. It’s cut and dried,” he told the British paper. “U.S. terrorism finance investigators view al-Taqwa as the spine on which other terrorist finance operations were built.”

U.S. and European investigators believe Bank al-Taqwa, which was originally set up in 1988 with significant backing from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, was at the middle of an international network of charities and companies used to funnel money to al-Qaida and to other groups, including Hamas.

According to the Financial Times, investigations into a network of Islamic businesses and charities in northern Virginia known as the Safa Group, which the U.S. believes funneled millions of dollars to terrorist groups, turned up links to al-Taqwa.

The names of Nada and his al-Taqwa co-founder, Ghaleb Himmat, were also found in an electronic organizer of Abdurrahman Alamoudi, who was charged last month with violating U.S. sanctions against Libya and is thought to be part of a larger U.S.-based terror financing network.

Nada and Nasreddin dismiss the allegations against them as “nonsense,” according to the Arab television network Al-Jazeera.

The network reports security analysts it talked to about the U.N. report were not surprised by its findings. A Middle East analyst at Jane’s Sentinel Security Assessments in London, Jeremy Binney, likened trying to stem the flow of illegal funds for terrorists to trying to snuff out organized crime in the West.

“It’s virtually impossible to do. If you block off one avenue, another one will spring up,” Binney told Al-Jazeera.

Speaking to international cooperation, Binney explained some countries were reluctant to release details of their investigations and arrests to protect the nature of their own intelligence.

“Information is power,” Al-Jazeera quotes him as saying.