FRANCAISInternational Islamic Relief Organisation of Saudi Arabia (al-Ighata al-Islamiya al-'alamiya) - History
1990-1999
-1991-1995, former Yugoslavia: under the name of IGASA, which corresponds to the local pronunciation of al-Ighatha, the IIRO funds the establishment of an Islamic Council of Eastern Europe, chaired by Jakub Selimoski, the leader of the Muslim community in Yugoslavia. The secretary-general of this structure, Fatih al-Hassanain, is a Sudanese activist of the NIF (National Islamic Front), the junta in power in Khartoum. After he completed his medical studies in Sarajevo, he got linked to Bosnian nationalists and founded in Vienna in 1987 an organization, the TWRA (Third World Relief Agency), to defend the rights of the Muslim minority in Yugoslavia. When the civil war escalates in Bosnia in 1992, he supports the resistance of the Muslims surrounded by the Serbians, especially Alija Izetbegovic and his Democratic Action Party, the SDA (Stranka demokratske akcije), which he supplies with arms and whose newspaper, Ljiljan, he subsidizes. The funds are paid to the Bosnian combatants through the TWRA. According to estimates, they amount to 350 millions dollars if the contributions of the IIRO and other Islamist NGOs are cumulated between 1992 and 1995. Such an activism obviously does not go unnoticed as IIRO identity cards are found on the bodies of mujaheddin killed in Bosnia. In July 1993 and April 1995 in Zagreb for instance, the Croatian police suspects the IIRO of hiding arms and search its offices. In September 1993, again, Slovenian customs officers at Maribor Airport intercept “humanitarian” parcels of the TWRA coming from Sudan and containing arms. In March 1995, eventually, the government of Macedonia closes the IIRO office in Skopje.
-From 1992 on, Kenya: the IIRO sends relief to drought victims and refugees fleeing war in Somalia. The organization mostly works in provinces where Muslim communities are predominant, namely the Somali Northeast and the Swahili Coast. But it is soon suspected of supporting a Somali Islamist armed faction, al-Itehad, on the Kenyan border. Under the pretext that the IIRO infringes immigration laws, the authorities temporarily close its offices after a terrorist attack on the American embassy in Nairobi in August 1998.
-From 1993 on, Azerbaijan: the IIRO sends relief to the victims of the conflict which opposes the Muslim Azeris and the Christian Armenians for the control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. The Saudi NGO shares out food and manages six clinics attached to three camps of Azeri displaced persons. Under the direction of Mohammed Qasim Aleid, it also takes care of orphans and supplies hospitals with drugs in Agdash and Baku. While the fighting decreases, it then begins agricultural projects in Agdash from 1995 onwards.
-1994-2006, Philippines: in November 2004, the authorities expel Mohamed Jamal Khalifah, Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law and the Saudi director of the IIRO in Manila. Present in the country since September 1991, he is accused of having funded training camps for Afghani combatants and Moro secessionists of Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist group specialized in kidnapping tourists. He is also suspected of supporting a terrorist cell which planned some attacks against the American President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II during official visits in Manila in November 1994 and January 1995 respectively. According to the police and the Philippine Daily Inquirer dated 9 August 2000, the funds transited from Jeddah through Ikhwan al-Islimin, a foundation managed by a certain Ustadz Muslimen. They were received by the local branch of the IIRO, IRIC (Islamic Research and Information Center), set up in Manila in 1993 and managed by Ahmad al-Hamwi, aka Abu Omar, a Syrian suspected in a 1986 bombing in Turkey. In Moroland in Southern Philippines, the funds were then channelled by Abdul Asmad, an official of Abu Sayyaf who worked for the IIRO in the region of Tawi-Tawi and who was killed in June 1994. Other employees of the Saudi NGO, respectively in the regions of Zamboanga, Maguindanao, Davao and Cotabato, are also members of the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) and related to the leaders of the guerrilla: Ustadz Bajunaid Ibrahim is the brother of Professor Moner Bajunaid (a negotiator); Ustadz Omar Pasigan, a cousin of Ebrahim el Haj Murad (the president of the movement); Ustadz Abdul Moin Galmac, a next of kin to the chief of military affairs in Davao; Abas Candao, a brother of Zaccarias Candao (a political adviser). Interviewed by the magazine Newsweek International dated 22 October 2001, a head of Abu Sayyaf confirms that “the primary purpose of the IIRO is to help groups like us.” As a matter of fact, the humanitarian activities of the Saudi organization are non-existent. Out of the thirty orphanages that Mohamed Jamal Khalifah pretended to have set up, it turns out that only one was really built. The main aim was to distribute the religious propaganda of Hamoud al-Lahim, a fundamentalist sheikh, and to construct mosques in Christian-dominated Luzon in the North of the country. The successors of Mohamed Jamal Khalifah do not perform better: Mahmud Abd Al-Jalil Afif is involved in the murder in June 1992 of Salvatore Carzeda, a Catholic father of the San Jose Gusu parish in Zamboanga, while Abd al-Hadi Daguit cannot prevent the Philippine branch of the IIRO from being closed down after it was classified as a terrorist organization by the United States in August 2006.
-1995, Jordan: expelled from the Philippines and arrested in the United States in December 1994, Mohamed Jamal Khalifah, the former director of the IIRO in Manila, is deported to Amman and brought before the courts. As he is the brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, the Americans suspect him of funding Ramzi Ahmed Youssef, who is accused of having planned the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 1993. In 1995, Mohamed Jamal Khalifah, who was sentenced to death in abstentia the previous year for an attack on a cinema in Amman, is however acquitted by the Jordanian justice. Placed under house arrest in Saudi Arabia, he will eventually die under mysterious circumstances during a flight to Madagascar in 2006.
-1996, Israel/Palestine: after Bosnia and the Philippines, controversies about the links of the IIRO with terrorist movements come up again. In June 1996, the organization thus has to refute supporting the Hamas.
-From 1998 on, Albania: from April 1998 until April 2000, the IIRO helps Kosovar who flee from the repression of the Serbian troops and take refuge in the region of Kukës. The NGO sets up a country hospital and supports free health centres in the camps of Sakrapar, Birat et Kafaya. As far as education is concerned, it prints out 225,000 schoolbooks and organizes separated classes for girls and boys. According to Xavier Pauly, the IIRO also funds volunteers who enlist in the Liberation Army of Kosovo, the UCK (Ushtria Clirimtare E Kosoves). One of its employees in Tirana, Mohamed al-Zawahiri, is the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s right hand man, and becomes a chief of the guerrilla’s special forces. Active in Albania since 1992, the IIRO can indeed rely on an important Islamist network. According to Millard Burr and Robert Collins, Mohamed al-Zawahiri hired al-Qaida activists like Mohammed Hassan Tita in January 1993 and Shawki Salama Attiya in August 1995, who arrived in Tirana from Sudan just after an attempt to assassinate the Egyptian President Mohammed Hosni Moubarak during an official visit in Khartoum.
-From 1999 on, former Yugoslavia: following the military intervention of the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) against the Serbian troops in Kosovo, the IIRO intervenes in Pristina, Bija and Kosovska Mitrovica. Out of a budget of 11 millions dollars, one third is dedicated to education. The NGO thus builds and rehabilitates schools to teach Arabic and the Koran. The best pupils are granted bonuses that are double for boys, as compared to girls. On that occasion, the IIRO develops a very moral education that, according to its own booklets quoted by Xavier Pauly, aims at containing the “deviations and distractions” of the western way of life. In the same vein, the NGO requires its local employees to let their beard grow and learn Arabic.
