When charity goes awry
Islamic groups say they may lose control of money they send overseas
In his fifth-floor conference room at the U.S. Department of Justice last week, Attorney General John Ashcroft gathered a handful of American Muslim and Arab leaders for a photo-op and relationship-building session. Seated two places to his left was a man named Abdulwahab Alkebsi, the executive director of the Islamic Institute, a Washington, D.C., group that works to build Muslim political influence. While the Islamic Institute plays a key role in the Republican Party's outreach to Muslims, Alkebsi's presence raises an instructive point: There are also huge difficulties in sorting out the various linkages of Muslim organizations in the United States and abroad--including ones under federal scrutiny--and the large amounts of money that flow between them.
To date, the U.S. Treasury Department has frozen the assets of 66 people and organizations believed linked to al Qaeda--and the list is expected to grow. A number of them, such as the foreign charities Wafa Humanitarian Organization and the Al Rashid Trust, actually do relief work, but are also suspected here and abroad of funneling money to al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. "These terrorists don't operate in a vacuum--they need a support network," says Ilan Berman, a counterterrorism expert and fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.
Aliases. Some charities make it difficult to identify the true nature of their operations. The Wafa Humanitarian Organization, for example, has used at least four aliases and operated from offices in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Partly because it was so hard to pin down Wafa's location and function, U.S. and foreign intelligence spent little time investigating the group before September 11. Meanwhile, members of Al Rashid, which delivers food to hungry Afghans and refugees, do not disguise their political leanings. "We have 800,000 [people] signed up with us to fight the jihad against the Americans," bragged one clerk at an Al Rashid office in Peshawar, Pakistan.
In the United States, the Islamic Institute--whose executive director attended the attorney general's meeting--seems not to have done anything to attract law enforcement attention. Yet in recent years, the institute has gotten advice and an $11,007 grant from another organization called the International Institute of Islamic Thought, which has attracted government scrutiny. The organization, based in a plain brick building in Herndon, Va., is part of a network of at least 11 Muslim nonprofit groups. The entities are tightly tied, through common officers there and transfers of money. Executives acknowledge they operate the groups in concert but say that's to gain tax benefits for a raft of related for-profit ventures, or to provide Muslim investors a way to satisfy their religion's requirements for charitable giving.
The members of this network--which don't appear on the Treasury's list--have raised at least $21.2 million in the last four years, shuffling funds among themselves and disbursing money around the globe, according to federal tax records. Their recipients include organizations in Somalia, Kuwait, Nigeria, Malaysia, and the Isle of Man, a self-governing crown dependency off the British coast with a reputation for money laundering. In 1997, a top-level scholar at the International Institute of Islamic Thought was deported on a visa violation after he was linked to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic militant group Hamas.
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