Islamic charities linked to terror groups in Pakistan funded by US government

Washington: The US government agencies have been funding the Islamic charities linked to terror groups based in Pakistan and the Middle East through InterAction, America's largest alliance of international non-profit organisations.

Publicly available official documents reveal that in January this year alone, the 1984-founded organization Inter Action which has over 180 member organizations, received $5 million from the US government. In the last decade, the US Agency for International Development and the State Department (USAID) granted tens of millions of dollars to InterAction. The DC-based organization, InterAction in 2017 launched a new platform called Together Project (TP) "to confront discrimination or targeted prejudicial regulations in the US due to their operating principles or religious faith".

Interestingly, contradicting its stated objective, the TP picked the most controversial Islamic charities -- Helping Hand for Relief & Development (HHRD), Islamic Relief (IR) USA, Zakat Foundation (ZF), American Relief Agency for the Horn of Africa (ARAHA) and United Muslim Relief (UMR) -- all linked to radical groups in the Middle East and Pakistan. The five charities form the core of the TP.

As per an IANS open source research, while HHRD organizes conferences in Pakistan with Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation and the Milli Muslim League, the charitable and political wings respectively of the Pakistani terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba. Incidentally, Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global watchdog on terror funding, has put Pakistan on its 'grey list' for its failure to curb terror financing.

The IR-USA is a branch of Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) which has been designated as a terror organization by the UAE. German and Swedish governments have claimed that IRW has significant ties to Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist transnational political movement. Similarly, Zakat Foundation was founded by Halil Demir, a former public relations officer for Benevolence International Foundation, a US-designated terror group. The charity partners with the Istanbul-based NGO, Foundation for Human Rights, Liberties and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NGO has allegedly been tied to Al-Qaeda.

ARAHA is known to have ties with extremists like Yusuf Estes who publicly supports death for apostates. He participated in one of their fundraisers in May 2019. UMR's officials publicly support Hamas, the Islamic terror group of Palestine.

DC-based sources investigating the Islamist terror-funding said the Together Project has been lobbying with the US Congress to "weaken counter-terror mechanisms, deploying InterAction's immense resources to, first, delegitimize claims of wrongdoing aimed at its members organizations and second, advance legislation designed to weaken counter-terror finance laws."