ISIL takes up to $45m in ransoms

The pace of ISIL’s kidnapping revenues seemed to be outstripping those of Al Qaeda affiliates om Yemen and Maghreb who pioneered the trade of kidnapping for ransom.

FIle photo of ISIL fighters parading in a commandeered Iraqi security forces armored vehicle down a main road at the northern city of Mosul, Iraq. AP Photo

NEW YORK // ISIL extremists in Iraq and Syria have received between $35 and $45 million in the past year alone from kidnapping for ransom, a United Nations expert who monitors sanctions against Al Qaeda and Taliban groups has said.

The figure was more than double the $20 million estimate cited by the US treasury department’s top counter-terrorism official last month.

An estimated $120 million in ransom was paid to Islamist militant groups between 2004 and 2012, before the rise of ISIL, Yotsna Lalji-Venketasawmy told the UN Security Council’s counter-terrorism committee on Monday.

But the “kidnapping for ransom as a tactic continues to grow” and is now “the core Al Qaeda tactic for generating revenue”, she said, adding that the increasing threat has been made “clear by what the whole world has witnessed with the actions of ISIL”.

While she did not provide a year-by-year breakdown of the earnings by extremist groups, the pace of ISIL’s kidnapping revenues seemed to be outstripping those of Al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and the Maghreb who pioneered the profitable trade.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) earned $20 million between 2011 and 2013, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb made $75 million in the past four years, Ms Lalji-Venketasawmy said.

A letter between the leaders of the two affiliates that was intercepted in 2012 stated that ransoming westerners is a “profitable trade and precious treasure”, but the chaos of the Syrian war and its drawing of journalists and aid workers to the region has allowed Al Qaeda’s rival ISIL to use the tactic to score major propaganda victories and earn tens of millions of dollars.

Other Al Qaeda-linked groups in Africa, Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al Shabab in Somalia, have earned unspecified “millions of dollars over the past years”, while Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines has made around $1.5 million overall, she said.

The ransom proceeds are invested in arms, explosives, logistical networks and into running training camps, according to Ms Lalji-Venketasawmy. AQAP pays tribesmen to carry out the kidnappings, while the other groups generally snatch hostages themselves.

The gruesome, high-definition videos of a British militant beheading a number of American and British journalists and aid workers, have brought ISIL to the forefront of popular attention in the US and Europe, and pushed Washington to commit to a long-term fight against ISIL.

But according to the UN Al Qaeda sanctions committee, while western hostages have brought the largest ransoms, by far the greatest proportion of victims are local people kidnapped by the groups in their own countries.

The UN Security Council has passed a number of resolutions on Islamist groups including ISIL that prohibit countries from paying ransoms, but “implementation challenges persist”, Ms Lalji-Venketasawmy said.

European governments are thought to have paid for the release of citizens held hostage by ISIL, and Qatar is alleged to have been involved in paying ransoms for western and other hostages held by Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, Jabhat Al Nusra.

After anger of families of US hostages murdered by ISIL, who said the US administration did not do enough to free their relatives, US president Barack Obama last week ordered a review of how officials respond to kidnappings. He emphasised, however, that there will be no change to the US policy regarding ransom payments. The country does not pay because officials say it only encourages kidnappings and endangers others.