For years – and until recently – a good half a dozen Qatari individuals were funding al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria or the Shebab in Somalia. For the purposes of our investigation, on the book published with my colleague Christian Chesnot (Nos très chers émirs, sont-ils vraiment nos amis), we met in 2016 one of these terrorist financiers, Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman bin Omer al-Nuaimi in Doha, who has been on the European Union and United States black lists since 2014.
Apart from belonging to radical Islamist ideology, what is the common link between Al-Qaeda and Daesh, even though they are rivals? And the one between the brain behind the 11 September attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the ‘star’ preacher of the Al-Jazeera chain, Youssef Al-Qaradawi? And a myriad of pro-Islamic networks of influence and funding, established both in the Arab world and in the great capital cities of the West?
The answer is unequivocal: the pan-Islamic Fraternity of the Muslim Brotherhood! This emerges from a very detailed study titled ‘The Muslim Brotherhood’s ties to Extremists’ produced by the US think-tank Counter Extremism Project.
The death of the youngest son of al-Qaeda’s founder, Hamza bin Laden (30 years old), announced at the end of July and officially confirmed by the Pentagon on August 22, is one of the hardest blows that the mother house of global jihadism has suffered since the death of its founder in May 2011.
Who is the Islamist in Switzerland who has monopolized the media most in the last decade? Tariq Ramadan, suspected of rape, or his brother Hani, director of the Geneva Islamic Center, and a strong advocate of stoning? Not at all, it is Nicolas Blancho, a 36-year-old convert with a long bushy red beard, chairman of the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland (CCIS), a structure whose true audience it is difficult to assess.
According to the findings of a confidential French investigation, the leader of the oil tanker Total kidnapped in Libya last April, then released for ransom, was watched over by militias allied with the government of Fayez el-Serraj, since the beginning of the attack of the Marshal Haftar on Tripoli.
Terrorism continues to spread in Central Africa, particularly in Burkina Faso and Central African Republic, but also in Congo-Kinshasa. A regional instability that worries at the highest level the United States and the major European powers. And there’s a new challenge in central Africa, as a consequence of the antiterrorist fight.
In a recent confidential note, Europol expressed concern about Daesh’s logistics networks, identified several months ago, which are involved in major movements of trafficking and storage of explosives in several Central European countries and the Balkans.
Can you openly finance the ‘brain’ of the most spectacular and lethal terrorist attack in History, one that shook the foundations of the first world power and caused nearly 3,000 victims, and manage to avoid any prosecution or indictment?Even worse, can you be on the blacklists of the UN and the US Treasury and continue surreptitiously accessing your supposedly frozen assets to take out the tidy sum of 120 million dollars per year, i.e. $10,000 per month?
The Wall Street Journal’s recent revelations about failures and inadequacies of the UN sanctions program against the financing of terrorism, have made break out what many UN experts and officials knew and have denounced for many years.
The ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared in a propaganda video published by the mediatic arm of the organization Al-Furqan. An outbreak that marks a turning point in the operating mode of the terrorist organization that his boss described as “war of attrition”.
