The United States and other nations have frozen more than $150-million of “terrorist assets” in the global anti-terrorism fight, a senior US official said on Wednesday.
“Key financiers have been detained, over $150-million of terrorist assets have been frozen and millions more blocked in transit or seized at borders,” US State Department counterrorism co-ordinator Henry Crumpton told a 55-nation Organisation for Security and Co-operation (OSCE) in Europe conference on combating terrorist financing that opened in Vienna on Wednesday.
Crumpton said however that “attacking terrorist finances is not an end unto itself,” since terrorism needs to be fought on many fronts.
But he said the financial front is fruitful since “by breaking financial flows, enemy leadership becomes isolated and constrained”.
Crumpton gave as an example a “recently intercepted letter” from al-Qaeda’s overall number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi complaining “about the difficulties of command and control and the lack of funds, and asks for $100 000”.
Crumpton said “disrupting financial links” also yields valuable intelligence about terrorist organisations as “the trail of money can lead to operatives and support networks and can point the way to deeper intelligence collection”.
Nato as well as UN drug officials were also participating in the OSCE’s meeting which is discussing how to block the channels through which terrorism is financed. – AFP