By Michael Ashcraft and Mark Ellis
As a means to finance their murderous “caliphate,” the Islamic State is harvesting organs to sell on the black market in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, according to the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations.
Mohamed Alhakim said his country has found dozens of bodies with surgical incisions and missing body parts in shallow mass graves in recent weeks outside Mosul, where ISIS remains in power, the UK Daily Mail reports.
“We have bodies. Come and examine them,” says Alhakim, who made the allegations before the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday. “It is clear they are missing certain parts.”
Furthermore, dozens of doctors in Mosul have been executed in Mosul for refusing to perform organ harvesting, he says.
A $2 million-a-day income is financing its jihadist war against Syria, Iraq and the West. Other sources of terrorist funding come from the sale of oil, ransom payments and purloined antiquities, Daily Mail reports.
Outgoing UN envoy to Iraq, Nikolay Mladenov, adds, “It’s very clear that the tactics ISIL is using expand by the day,” the Daily Mail reports. The Islamic State is known by various acronyms, either ISIS or ISIL.
ISIS controls one-third of Iraq and an equal proportion of Syria, where they reign with a draconian application of sharia law over a population of 4 million people. Christians and Kurds have been targeted for senseless, mass killing, human trafficking and child bride enslavement.
Without access directly to donor, patients needing kidneys, livers and hearts can languor on waiting lists for years. According to Wikipedia, a kidney can fetch as much as $160,000 on the black market. Some of the organs have been harvested from fallen fighters and injured soldiers, in addition to kidnap victims, the Daily Mail reports.
The organs must be transported quickly out of Syria where criminal gangs sell them to Saudi or Turkish clients on the black market, according to the Assyrian International News Agency.
Founded in 1999, ISIS broke away from al-Qaeda, Osama Ben Ladin’s terrorist organization, in February of 2014, ending 10 years of pledged allegiance. Its leadership comprises many of former staff of executed Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein. It grew rapidly after joining the uprising against Syrian dictator Assad in 2011. In June 2014, ISIS declared its caliphate, a government based on the early successors of the prophet Mohammed.
The United Nations holds ISIS responsible for ethnic cleansing, human rights abuses and war crimes on a “historic scale,” according to Wikipedia. More than 60 countries are in the coalition to crush ISIS, and even Iran has joined its longtime enemy of the United States to battled ISIS.
Part of ISIS success is due to the effective mobilization of social media to churn out its global jihadist doctrine and recruit fighters and funds. They send an estimated 90,000 tweets and other social media signals a day, according to a New York Times article. Their beheading videos, while macabre, are highly-stylized productions produced talented editors, say production experts.
Comments are closed.