I n its first meeting at the finance ministers’ level, the UN Security Council on Thursday unanimously adopted a resolution to cut off all sources of funding for Islamic State (IS) and other “terrorist groups”.
Advertisement
The measure builds on a previous resolution setting up an Al-Qaeda blacklist, which will be renamed the “ISIL (Daesh) and Al-Qaeda sanctions list” to signal the UN’s stronger focus on the IS extremists.
Sanctions are also threatened on anyone supporting IS – also known as ISIL – or their offshoots.
According to the London-based IHS analysis firm, the Islamic State group is pulling in $80 million per month, but Russian and USA coalition air strikes on oil facilities are putting a strain on its finances.
“The good news is that it’s diminishing as a combination of the kind of financial action we’re taking, and frankly military action against the oil fields are having their effect, and that’s something we should welcome”, Osborne said.
“We already have a lot of these tools… we’re going to be bringing together a lot of strands, but what we most need now is states to do what they’re supposed to do”, said a USA official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said the extremist group’s oil revenues are estimated to represent 40-45 per cent of IS’ income.
“Implementation of key Security Council resolutions on this subject remains weak in many parts of the world”.
While half of those countries found with serious problems in the last two months have introduced laws to address them, he said only a small number of countries “have secured convictions for terrorist financing” and most are too slow in implementing asset freezes. He also singled out Turkey as a principal transport zone for oil shipments originating in IS-controlled territory. “As we have all learned – with our work to counter Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other groups to date – the successful use of these counter-terror financing tools requires robust domestic implementation, deep collaboration with private partners, and intense multilateral coordination and information-sharing”, he said.
According to the United Nations envoy, Russian Federation was the only member that could provide proof of concrete schemes used by other countries to engage in illegal oil trade with Islamic State or how IS able to use the revenue from those transactions to purchase weapons from other countries, particularly from a few in Eastern Europe.
It says that governments must prevent its citizens from funding or providing services to “terrorist organizations or individual terrorists for any objective, including but not limited to recruitment, training, or travel, even in the absence of a link to a specific terrorist act”.
“They just have this ability to just latch onto these new technologies and utilize them”, said Sapin.
Advertisement
The resolution calls on countries to submit a report updating the sanctions committee no later than 120 days from Tuesday.
