South Africa is a growing conduit for Islamic State funds

South Africa is continuing to provoke international concern because of its allegedly expanding role as a conduit of funds from the leadership of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to its affiliates in Africa.

This emerged from a new United Nations report this week which says that after Isil’s loss of its territorial caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2016, its affiliates in Africa have emerged as among its most important battlegrounds.

The report to the UN Security Council by a team of experts monitoring Isil and Al-Qaeda says one UN member state “highlighted the emerging importance of South Africa in facilitating transfers of funds from Isil leadership to affiliates in Africa. The Monitoring Team is aware of several large transactions totalling more than $1-million.”

The experts assess that “the most vigorous and best-established Isil regional networks are those with hubs in Afghanistan, Somalia and the Lake Chad Basin.”

Although the most violent and deadly jihadist group in Somalia, Al-Shabaab, is an Al-Qaeda affiliate, the report says Isil’s Al-Karrar office in Somalia is active, covering Somalia, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The Ahlu-Sunna Wa-Jama’a (ASWJ) jihadist insurgency in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province has been affiliated with Islamic State (IS) for the past three years but the precise organogram is not clear. The US has previously described ASWJ — as well as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which operates mainly in the DRC but also in Uganda — as affiliated with IS through “Islamic State — Central Africa Province”.

However, this week’s UN report suggests a different lineage through Somalia. But the UN authors agree with most analysts that it remains unclear whether the IS hierarchy commands and controls the ASWJ and ADF and other affiliates or whether they operate largely independently.

Source: MSN