The Obama administration approved a grant of $200,000 of U.S. taxpayer money to an al-Qaida affiliate in Sudan – a decade after the U.S. Treasury Department designated it a terrorist-financing organization – the National Review reported last week, after the discovery was made by conservative think tank the Middle East Forum.
In 2004, the Khartoum-based Islamic Relief Agency, also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency, was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control because of its links to Osama bin Laden and his organization Maktab al-Khidamat, the precursor of al-Qaida.
In 2014, the U.S. Agency for International Development authorized a grant of $723,405 to World Vision, an evangelical international charity, for a humanitarian project in the Blue Nile region of Sudan. According to the funding agreement, $200,000 of that grant was designated as a sub-award for ISRA for the purposes of humanitarian relief for displaced persons.
The U.S. Treasury also singled out ISRA for "serving as a conduit to Hamas" in an unnamed European country during the Second Intifada in the early 2000's, i24 News reported.
David Wade, then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's chief of staff, told i24 News that this was the first he or Kerry had heard of the USAID award to ISRA.
"Grants don't typically cross the desk of the secretary's office," he said. "I don't recall that I ever, or the secretary ever had eyes on any specific grant award – that's just not the way it works."
Current State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert told the National Review that "as this occurred under the prior administration, the current secretary of the state, secretary of treasury … had no involvement in decisions surrounding this award or subsequent license."
