[TELEGRAPH.CO.UK] In the great jihadi funding bazaar that is the Gulf state of Kuwait, there's a terror finance option for every pocket, from the private foundations dealing in tens of millions to the more retail end of the market. Give enough for 50 sniper bullets (50 dinars, about £110), promises the al-Qaeda and Islamic State-linked holy man tweeting under the name "jahd bmalk", and you will earn "silver status". Donate 100 dinars to buy eight badly needed mortar rounds, and he'll make you a "gold status donor".
As the jihadi funders hand out loyalty cards, the West has belatedly realised that some of its supposed friends in the Gulf have been playing the disloyalty card. Had Kuwait not been freed by American, British and allied troops in 1991, it would presumably now still be the "19th province" of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But the emirate has repaid the Western blood and treasure spent in its liberation by becoming, in the words of David Cohen, the US undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, the "epicentre of funding for terrorist groups in Syria".
Islamic State (Isil), with its newly conquered territory, oilfields and bank vaults, no longer needs much foreign money. But its extraordinarily swift rise to this point, a place where it threatens the entire region and the West, was substantially paid for by the allies of the West. Isil's cash was raised in, or channelled through, Kuwait and Qatar |