US seizes websites, crypto-currency from ISIS, other terror groups
WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) – The US Justice Department announced on Thursday that it had seized some $2 million in crypto-currency, including Bitcoin, which was part of the fund-raising efforts of ISIS, as well as two other Middle Eastern terrorist organizations.
Most of the money that the US seized was raised by Hamas and al-Qaida and based on an appeal for solidarity to other Muslims.
The ISIS effort was unique and somewhat surprising. It was based on the on-line sale of supposedly sophisticated personal protective equipment (PPE) to guard against the coronavirus, as the pandemic emerged in early 2020.
The fraudulent products were sold on the website, FaceMaskCenter.com, which was established in February 2020, by a Turkish national, Murat Cakar, whom the Department of Justice (DoJ) described as “an ISIS facilitator.”
FaceMaskCenter.com said that it had available for sale sophisticated N95 masks, whose quality had been officially certified by the US Food and Drug Administration.
“Site administrators claimed to have near unlimited supplies of the masks, in spite of such items being officially-designated as scarce,” DoJ charged on Thursday.
FaceMaskCenter.com also claimed to be selling other PPE, including gloves, goggles, protective Tyvek suits, and thermometers.
“The site administrators offered to sell these items to customers across the globe, including a customer in the United States who sought to purchase N95 masks and other protective equipment for hospitals, nursing homes, and fire departments,” DoJ stated.
The administrators claimed that the company was “owned and operated by sanitary experts” and that its website had been launched in 1996. However, “publicly available website registration records revealed that the website was created from an IP address in Turkey on February 26, 2020,” DoJ explained, as it also noted, “The site is not ‘owned and operated’ by sanitary experts.”
Zoobia Shahnaz is a young Pakistani-American woman who was arrested in 2017 for supporting ISIS. She attempted to fly from New York to Syria to join the terrorist organization. However, she was stopped and arrested at the airport. Subsequently, she confessed to sending over $150,000 to ISIS front companies in Pakistan, China, and Turkey.
Shahnaz obtained the money that she sent ISIS through credit card fraud, and she used bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to transfer the funds.
On Thursday, DoJ said that Shahnaz also “sent approximately $100,000 to an alias of Murat Cakar.”
Understanding ISIS and what it is
As the documents released on Thursday explain, ISIS is merely the latest iteration of al Qaida in Iraq, which started with yet another name.
“On or about October 15, 2004”—some 19 months after the US war in Iraq, formally known as Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), began—“the U.S. Secretary of State designated al Qaida in Iraq (“AQI”), then known as Jam’at al Tawhid wa’al-Jihad, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (‘FTO’),” DoJ noted.
“On or about May 15, 2014, the Secretary of State amended the designation of AQI as an FTO” to “add the alias Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (‘ISIL’) as its primary name,” DoJ explained. ISIL was later changed to ISIS—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—as the official US name for the terrorist organization.
Already in October 2004, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a key figure behind OIF, told The Atlantic Monthly: the core of the violence emerging in Iraq was the Baathist regime, which the US had just overthrown.
Some 11 years later, the highly regarded German news magazine, Der Spiegel, carried a report which was actually a leak from German intelligence: “Secret Files Reveal the Structure of Islamic State.”
The core of ISIS is the former Iraqi regime, the Der Spiegel article, based on captured documents, explained.
That perspective is similar to the official Kurdish view that ISIS is predominantly local—and not a nebulous international phenomenon. Moreover, support for ISIS is driven by sectarianism and other aspects of Baghdad’s poor governance, which increasingly excluded Sunnis, once US forces left Iraq in 2011.
Read More: Najmaldin Karim: Islamic State is resurgent, dominated by locals
Read More: KRG: Iraq’s pre-2014 sectarian government helped create ISIS
And as Wolfowitz advised The Atlantic Monthly some 16 years ago, “If you don't see who the enemy is and why they're fighting, you can't win.”
Editing by John J. Catherine