The U.S. Treasury Department unveiled sanctions on Friday against three terror recruiters who urged individuals residing in Southeast Asia to join the Islamic State (ISIS).
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), mandated with overseeing U.S. economic and trade sanctions, designated three senior ISIS recruiters — Mohamad Rafi Udin, Mohammed Karim Yusop Faiz, and Mohammad Reza Lahaman Kiram — for calling on Southeast Asia residents to join the global radical Islamic terror organization and being “featured in an official ISIS beheading video, where they executed captives held by ISIS.”
“Treasury is targeting ISIS recruiters who have engaged in a beheading video and other brutal acts as part of a propaganda campaign to attract radicals to join militant terrorist groups in Southeast Asia,” the agency’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Sigal Mandelker said in a statement. “We are sanctioning these terrorists along with our UN international partners as part of a coordinated effort to counter ISIS’s global networks that enable the group to recruit foreign fighters to conduct international terror attacks.”
United Nations member states are now obligated to freeze assets, prohibit travel, and deny access to the global financial system of the three terror recruiters.
ISIS, which has lost control over a vast majority of once-controlled territory since President Donald Trump took office, may be readying a resurgence with up to 30,000 fighters stationed in Iraq and Syria, a recently released U.N. report states.
“Taken at face value, the U.S. government is saying ISIS has the same number of fighters in Iraq and Syria today as when the [coalition] bombing campaign began,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Thomas Joscelyn said in an interview last week with Voice of America (VOA).
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