Turkish Charity Still Not on Terror List Despite Numerous Calls
by John Rossomando
IPT News
January 29, 2014
It has been implicated in the
Millennium bomb plot
targeting Los Angeles International Airport. It openly led a campaign
to break Israel's blockade on Gaza – meant to block supplies and weapons
from reaching Hamas terrorists. It has also been implicated in a
Libyan gunrunning operation aimed at supplying Syrian rebels that allegedly involved an al-Qaida linked figure.
And now, six of its offices were
raided Jan. 14 by Turkish authorities in connection with an investigation of al-Qaida.
The Turkey-based
IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation has been designated as a terrorist group by U.S. allies Israel, Germany and the Netherlands.
But three years after a super-majority of U.S. senators asked the
Obama administration to designate IHH, nothing has happened. The letter,
signed by 87 senators from both parties,
came weeks after IHH organized a flotilla in conjunction with the group
Viva Palestina, headed by British parliamentarian George Galloway,
tried to break Israel's blockade of Gaza in support of Hamas.
The flotilla ended in violence when the ship ignored orders to turn away from the blockaded area. Ship passengers then
attacked Israeli commandos with gunfire, knives and clubs. The Israelis noted that they were
prepared for a fight.
Nine IHH activists were killed.
The flotilla stemmed from the "Istanbul declaration" issued in
February 2009 under the title of "Gaza victory" that the "Islamic
nation" should
aid Hamas
in its jihad against Israel with "money, clothing, food, medicine,
weapons and other essentials so that they are able to live and perform
the jihad in the way of Allah Almighty." This jihad should continue
until "the liberation of all Palestine" is achieved.
The declaration also said that Muslims should fight the blockade of Gaza in every way possible.
In the latest investigation,
Turkish authorities
accuse IHH of recruiting terrorists to fight alongside the al-Qaida
brigades in Syria; evacuating the wounded terrorists in ambulances while
simultaneously transporting new ones to the battlefield; and smuggling
arms under the guise of providing aid.
The Turkish army
stopped a truck purportedly owned by the charity on Jan. 1 under suspicion it was carrying weapons into Syria.
Germany, the
Netherlands and Israel already list IHH as a terrorist organization. But the United States has taken no action.
The 2010 Senate letter to President Obama expressed deep concern
"about the IHH's role in this incident and have additional questions
about Turkey and any connections to Hamas. The IHH is a member of a
group of Muslim charities, the
Union of Good,
which was designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as a terrorist
organization. The Union of Good was created by, and strongly supports
Hamas, which has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by
the US State Department. We recommend that your administration consider
whether the IHH should be put on the list of foreign terrorist
organizations, after an examination by the intelligence community, the
State Department, and the Treasury Department."
A year later, five senators who signed the original letter
sent the president a follow-up
urging "your formal designation of IHH without delay." They pointed to a
February 2009 Hamas rally in which they said IHH's leadership aimed to
"overthrow governments and replace them with Islamist dictatorships."
They also noted that Hamas's political leader Khaled Meshaal
praised IHH head Bülent Yildirim for his support during a
January 2009 meeting the two had in Damascus.
No reply was ever received, said Donelle Harder, press secretary to
Sen. James Inhofe, who was among the senators who signed the letter.
Other efforts met with similar silence.
Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla.,
introduced legislation
in 2011 that would have asked then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
to report whether groups supporting the flotilla should be designated as
terrorist organizations, classified the IHH as a terrorist
organization, but it went
nowhere.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman asked former U.S. Secretary
of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano "to examine the possibility" of
classifying IHH as a terrorist group in January 2011.
The State Department declined to comment for this story about the lack of an IHH terror designation.
But in 2010, spokesman P.J. Crowley
said
the administration knew "that IHH representatives have met with senior
Hamas officials in Turkey, Syria and Gaza over the past three years.
That is obviously of great concern to us." A year earlier, U.S. Treasury
officials
raised similar concerns about IHH to Turkish officials, a leaked State Department cable shows.
Why the hesitancy?
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan enjoys close relations
with IHH. He actively supported IHH's flotilla campaign, an Israeli
think-tank
reported, "and without their help he could not have been elected."
President Obama, in turn, has
identified Erdogan among the five global leaders with whom he enjoys the warmest relations. The two
reportedly engaged in frequent telephone calls.
The influential Center for American Progress (CAP) came out strongly
against the idea of adding IHH to the State Department terror list. CAP
criticized the senators
who promoted the idea, saying that it would not be in the U.S.'s
"long-term interest" to do so. Doing so would blur the distinction
between groups that have members supportive of Hamas or other terrorist
organizations and organizations that actively fund terror groups.
"Including IHH on the FTO list without stronger evidence that it is
directly involved as an organization in providing financial and other
types of support to violent terrorist groups such as Hamas and al-Qaeda
only serves to lower the political and moral standards for such
designations," the CAP report
said.
The left-leaning magazine,
The Nation, describes CAP as "the most influential of all think tanks during the Obama era."
But the evidence against IHH does tie it to violent terrorists, and Hamas officials worked closely with IHH on the flotilla.
Hamas leaders
repaired Gaza's port and dredged its harbor to allow mid-sized ships to navigate its waters. IHH helped oversee repairs to the port.
An IHH chartered ship, the
al-Entisar,
was involved in the shipment of arms to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in
June 2012. Libyan journalist Areesh Saeed, who was on the al-Entisar
when it smuggled the weapons from Libya to Syria, told the Investigative
Project on Terrorism (IPT) in an exclusive interview that Belhaj may
have been involved with the collection of the weapons that went to
Syria.
"It was clear from that second what was happening. The Muslim
Brotherhood, through its ties in Turkey, was seizing control of this
ship and the cargo," Samar Srewel, an FSA activist who had helped to
ship the arms,
told the Times of London in September 2012. "This is what they do. They buy influence with their money and guns."
Two IHH aid workers were
arrested in 2011 by Somali authorities after they met with al-Shabaab – al-Qaida's Somali affiliate.
IHH's reported al-Qaida ties go back further. Court documents entered
in Abdurrahman Alamoudi's 2003 terrorism finance trial suggest that IHH
"[a]n important role" in al-Qaida's Millennium bomb plot. The plot involved a failed effort to
bomb Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) in December 1999.
"The IHH is an NGO, but it was kind of a type of cover-up in order to
obtain forged documents to obtain different forms of infiltration for
Mujahadeen in combat … And finally, one of the responsibilities that
they had was also to be implicated in weapons trafficking," French
counter-terrorism magistrate Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere testified in the
case of would-be Millennium bomber
Ahmed Ressam.
The Danish Institute for International Studies
issued a report in 2006
stating that Turkish authorities investigated IHH in December 1997.
Turkish authorities found that the charity's leaders had been purchased
automatic weapons from Islamic extremist groups, according to the
report. A raid of IHH's offices in Istanbul turned up weapons,
explosives, instructions for manufacturing IEDs and a "jihad flag."
The IHH members detained by Turkish authorities at the time were found to be planning to go to
fight in Bosnia, Chechnya or Afghanistan.
The Danish report cited Brugiere also having
said
that Yildirim had attempted to recruit soldiers for a coming jihad. IHH
phone records from 1996 found that repeated phone calls had been placed
to an al-Qaida safe house in Milan as well as to various Algerian
terrorists.
The
Washington Post placed blame for the flotilla violence squarely on Erdogan's shoulders
in a June 2010 editorial.
It condemned Erdogan, saying he had "shown a sympathy toward Islamic
militants and a penchant for grotesque demagoguery toward Israel."
A penchant for demagoguery toward a key U.S. ally. A close political
alliance with a group that put its belief in jihad and Hamas
in writing.
If the Obama administration is not willing to risk Erdogan's anger and
designate IHH, it at least should explain why. A letter responding to a
stunningly deep bipartisan group of senators would be a good start.
As
President Obama delivered the State of the Union, minds undoubtedly
reflected on the state of America in the international community. A
partial review of the President’s foreign policy record reveals
disturbing trends: naiveté; failure to appreciate and adapt to changing
threats; lack of follow-through; and policies driven by public
opinion, rather than a broad foreign policy strategy. These trends stem
from the President’s policy of “leading from behind”—an approach that
has, instead, resulted in an absence of leadership. America’s
reputation abroad has suffered, influence has diminished, and
relationships with key allies have been weakened. Meanwhile,
continuing conflict in the Middle East and increasing instability in
the Asia-Pacific region strain U.S. resources and capabilities. 
The
State Department broke with normal procedures last week when it ordered
the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) not to conduct a secondary
inspection on members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and
Justice Party (FJP) on their way to visit government officials and think
tanks in the United States.
Newly released records confirm a 2012 Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)