The United States announced sanctions on a network of five ISIS financial intermediaries operating in Indonesia, Syria and Turkey.
Those on the list were accused of facilitating the travel of extremists to Syria and other areas where ISIS operates, and supporting ISIS’s activities in refugee camps in Syria, the U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement today.
The Ministry of Finance reported that this network collects funds from Indonesia and Turkey and sends them to foreign fighters of ISIS.
It was stated that some of these resources were used to smuggle children from the camps and use them as potential fighters.
The ministry said in a statement that the residents of refugee camps in Syria include those displaced by IS, as well as members of ISIS, their supporters and their families. The statement said, “ISIS sympathizers from more than 40 countries are sending money to ISIS-affiliated individuals staying in these camps to help the organization regain power.”
The ministry reported that about 70,000 people, mostly women and children, remain in Al Hol, the largest refugee camp in northern Syria.
In the statement, it was stated that “ISIS supporters only sent $20,000 a month to Al Hol via an unofficial money transfer mechanism, ‘hawala’,” and noted that most of these resources went from outside Syria or through neighboring countries such as Turkey.
The ministry noted that ISIS has smuggled its supporters from Al Hol to regions such as Syria’s Idlib, Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa since 2019, adding that the majority of these kidnappings were children and that they were raised to fight in the organization.
“The United States, as part of the Global Coalition to Fight ISIS, is determined to prevent ISIS from collecting resources and transferring its resources between regions,” said Brian Nelson, Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.
The names on the list were announced as Dwi Dahlia Susanti, Rudi Heryadi, Ari Kardian, Muhammad Dandi Adhiguna and Dini Ramadhani. Their assets in the US were frozen and Americans were prohibited from doing business with them.