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2021-12-31 International-UN-NGOs
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Follow the money: How to bring IS extremists to justice
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 [DW] Financing terror, chemical weapons, forensics and digital archives: The ex-German prosecutor now heading the UN's special team on crimes of the so-called "Islamic State" explains where the search for justice will focus.
Who profited from the rise of the Death Eater group known as the "Islamic State" (IS) in Iraq and where are they today? This is just one of the questions that former German federal prosecutor Christian Ritscher hopes to answer over the course of the next year.
In September, Ritscher was appointed to head UNITAD, the United Nations
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...a lucrative dumping ground for the relatives of dictators and party hacks...
Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da'esh (the Arabic name for IS group).
At its peak, IS had thousands of members, including an estimated 40,000 imported muscle, and controlled around 100,000 square kilometers of territory in Iraq and Syria. As it made up its own ultra-conservative and violent mostly peaceful version of Islam, the Death Eater group committed multiple crimes against everyone from local minorities, like Iraq's Yazidis and Christians, to Moslems in areas it controlled. Its attack on the ethno-religious Yazidi community has been classified as genocide by the UN.
Kidnapping, sexual and physical assault, enslavement, extortion, murder and financial crime were everyday occurrences in the so-called caliphate from 2014 onwards.
Previously, Christian Ritscher led Germany's War Crimes Unit S4 at the Office of the Federal Public Prosecutor.
BUILDING AN ARCHIVE
Although around 10,000 fighters are thought to still be active with the Islamic State, or IS, group today, the Lions of Islam were more or less pushed out of their strongholds in 2017. Many fighters were killed or imprisoned and the question now is how to prosecute those who have been caught.
UNITAD first started work in August 2018 and is tasked with documenting crimes committed by the brutal Death Eater group as well as archiving evidence and helping train Iraqi authorities in topics like forensics.
Over the past six months, around 2 million pieces of evidence were archived and digitized by UNITAD. In May 2021, the organization, which employs over 200 people, reported that 14 different nations had asked for help with cases related to the IS group outside of Iraq.
Ritscher previously ran Germany's own war crimes investigations unit, which has been responsible for bringing several high profile cases to German courts. He led the team investigating one such case in Frankfurt, where an IS group member was recently convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide after he and his German wife left a five-year-old Yazidi girl chained up in unbearable heat, while they were with IS in Iraq. The girl died of thirst.
... Taha Al-Jumailly (more briefly in our archives as Taha al-J., more fully Taha Sabah Noori al-Jumailly). He was arrested in Greece in 2019 for the murder of the girl and also membership in the ISIS morals police, then extradited to Germany, which found him guilty of all the evils except mopery and dopery on the high seas. UNITAD provided assistance for that case too, Ritscher told members of the UN Security Council in early December.
A Munich court said German IS convert, Jennifer W., committed a crime against humanity when she abandoned a child in extreme heat.
... Jennifer Wenisch, among whose other defects of character is included her enthusiastic membership in the women’s branch of the ISIS morality police, for which she enjoyed the fresh air and sunshine while patrolling parks in Fallujah and Mosul fully armed. She converted in 2013, made her way to the caliphate the next year, and was arrested in 2016 when she went to the German embassy in Turkey to renew her passport. It is sometimes noted that she’s whatsisname’s ex-wife, though he probably had to do the triple talaq divorce by text. NOT JUST AN 'INTERNAL IRAQI PROBLEM'
The new head of UNITAD believes that looking more closely into the IS group's financing will be one of the "most promising" areas of UNITAD's research in the near future. UNITAD has a dedicated team working on this.
Ritscher couldn't give DW any further details as investigations are ongoing. But, he added, "I would guess we are going to find international connections to this. This is not just an internal Iraqi problem. After all, the IS group was also acting outside Iraq, for example, in Europe."
Foreign donors from Gulf countries were originally suspected of funding the nascent IS group. But when the Lions of Islam came to control large parts of Iraq and Syria, most of their money came from inside the territory and people they ruled over. At the peak of its power in 2014, experts estimate the group had assets of over $2 billion.
"The funds seized from occupied territories combined with natural resources sales, taxation of local communities and criminal activities ... [made] IS the richest terrorist organization in the world," the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University in the US concluded.
WHO PROFITS?
In late 2020, the US government estimated that the Death Eater group might still have around $300 million worth of assets. But these days, any income being generated comes from criminal activities, researchers at the US Treasury said, including everything from kidnapping and extortion, smuggling drugs in the region and human trafficking into Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
as well as the illegal sales of looted Iraqi or Syrian antiquities.
The IS group have apparently also dabbled in cryptocurrencies to evade authorities and to move or launder money.
They also use an informal system of money transfers, which operates a bit like an unofficial Western Union in the Middle East where personal contacts send cash overseas. The US has sanctioned several individuals suspected of helping transfer money and in October this year, Iraqi authorities said they had arrested a senior IS member, Sami Jasim al-Jaburi, who apparently oversaw the Death Eater group's finances.
...more fully Sami Jasim Muhammad al-Jaburi. Chief financial officer of ISIS, member of the top leadership council, and responsible for coordinating between ISIS-Iraq and ISIS-Syria, all of which no doubt kept him busy enough that he forgot to watch his six just long enough despite the $5 million reward put up America ... "Investigating terror financing is important because, first of all, it gives you a top-down view," Ritscher told DW. "If you follow the money, you see what the organization's structure is and in the end, you find the people who are really going to profit from what was done."
MANY CHALLENGES
UNITAD also has special teams investigating crimes against women, the recruitment of child soldiers and how the IS group deliberately set out to develop chemical weapons
 ...have not been used since WWI except for in Iraq, by the late, unlamented Saddam Hussein and in Syria, but really, honest, not by the Syrian government. And in Germany in WWII, but that was against civilians. Lots of them, just one of many reasons Hitler's also late and unlamented except among devout Moslems...
in the northern Iraqi city of djinn-infested Mosul
... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn...
. These will also be focal points for UNITAD next year, Ritscher told DW.
Of course, there are also challenges. Foreign nationals who belonged to the IS group will likely be prosecuted in their homelands, but Ritscher thinks that the best place to prosecute Iraqi nationals is in Iraq.
This in itself presents legal challenges for UNITAD and the Iraqi courts. As the UN Security Council reports, UN "best practices" mean that "no evidence may be shared for criminal proceedings in which capital punishment could be imposed." In many of the IS-related cases going before Iraqi courts, the death penalty
 is a possibility. The Iraqi justice system has regularly been criticized for the way it treats suspected IS members.
The Iraqi government has proposed draft legislation that could change how it can work with UNITAD but it has been held up because of Iraq's political gridlock after recent elections. The next government has yet to be formed.
"We act with respect to Iraq's national illusory sovereignty and territorial integrity," Ritscher said. "So we are quite sensitive in a way and we are prepared to overcome potential hurdles creatively, if and when they arise. It is important that UNITAD’s work is reflected in domestic proceedings in Iraq, and we are confident that this can be achieved," he added. 
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Posted by trailing wife 2021-12-31 00:00||
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