The United States Treasury Department says it has imposed a second round of stiff sanctions on some South African firms it says have “provided financial or material support to the Islamic State group.”
The sanctions which were imposed on Monday, becomes the second of such sanctions in less than a week on people and firms in Africa who have links to the terrorist group.
The latest financial sanctions, according to the US Treasury, are targeting South African entities including a notorious cell leader, Farhad Hoomer, who was accused of expressing “the will and intent to attack the interests of the United States,” the Department said in a statement.
The Treasury Department has, last week, issued financial and diplomatic sanctions against a weapons trafficking network operating in Somalia with links to the Al-Shabaab extremist group.
The US had placed the sanction over what it said was a Somali Islamic State weapons trafficking cell accused with the proliferation of dangerous weapons into the Horn of Africa nation.
In the latest action by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, four people and eight companies controlled by individuals said to have links with the South African Islamic State cell including Nufael Akbar, Yunus Mohamad Akbar, Mohamad Akbar, and Umar Akbar.
Their gold trading, construction and other firms are also targeted for the sanctions with the move freezing and blocking potential transactions with US entities and preventing Americans from doing business with them.
“As part of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, the United States will continue to partner with South Africa to deny ISIS the ability to exploit the country’s economy to raise and transfer funds in support of ISIS terrorist activities,’Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Brian Nelson, said in the statement.
Nelson added that the sanctions were targeting “key individuals in ISIS’s network in South Africa, as well as their business assets, who have played pivotal roles in enabling terrorism and other criminal activities in the region.”