ISIS flag
The United States announced imposing sanctions on five people accused of collecting funds for the “Daesh” organization and using the funds to help smuggle children to work as fighters for the organization.
The US Treasury says these individuals have been instrumental in helping extremists travel to Syria and other areas where the terrorist organization is active.
Doi accused Dalia Susanti and her associates of facilitating the transfer of funds from Indonesia, Turkey and Syria, where the Treasury says Susanti used the money to help “smuggle teenage children from the camps into the desert, where they were received by foreign fighters, likely to work as child recruits for ISIS.”
Sanctions, imposed by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, block any property or other assets owned by individuals in the United States, and those who do business with sanctioned persons may be subject to secondary exposure.
The announcement comes just two days before the foreign ministers meeting of the global anti-ISIS coalition taking place in Morocco on Wednesday.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken had to cancel his plan to attend because he tested positive for COVID-19, but the United States will be represented by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, the third most prominent American diplomat.
The Treasury says that many individuals have made a significant portion of the transfers through refugee camps in Syria through fundraising in Indonesia and Turkey, where some of the money has been used to pay for “smuggling children out of the camps and handing them over to foreign fighters as potential recruits,” according to the Treasury Department.
Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson said that the Treasury Department intends to “expose and disrupt the network of international facilities that have supported ISIS recruitment, including the recruitment of vulnerable children in Syria.”
Of the nearly 40,000 foreign ISIS members identified in Iraq and Syria, 12 percent were children under the age of 18, according to a 2019 United Nations report.
“The United States, as part of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, is committed to denying (ISIS) the ability to raise and move funds across multiple jurisdictions,” Nelson said in a press release.