European governments that bargain with Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations for kidnapped citizens are inadvertently filling the coffers of those organizations, according to this report by Rukmini Callimachi in the New York Times. Collectively, these countries are “underwriting jihad,” providing extremist groups with “at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which $66 million was paid just last year,” the report notes.
According to the report:
These payments were made almost exclusively by European governments, who funneled the money through a network of proxies, sometimes masking it as development aid, according to interviews conducted for this article with former hostages, negotiators, diplomats and government officials in 10 countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The inner workings of the kidnapping business were also revealed in thousands of pages of internal Qaeda documents found by this reporter while on assignment for The Associated Press in northern Mali last year.
