USAID provided assistance to Al Qaeda, Hezbollah terrorists – report

The agency targeted by the Trump administration reportedly funded a future senior Al Qaeda recruiter’s college tuition and sent supplies to Hezbollah.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

As increasingly more cases of fraud and corruption are exposed at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), two more cases of its support of Muslim terrorists have come to light.

The New York Post reported Tuesday that an Israeli soldier had found boxes marked “USAID” among a cache of sniper rifles, anti-tank missiles, and explosives in a village in southern Lebanon.

Asher Fredman, who in civilian life is the executive director of the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, told the daily that he had found the items in a village set up to be a “forward base” for Hezbollah in its plans to invade Israel.

NGO Monitor founder Gerald Steinberg said last week that “the folks at USAID knew that taxpayers’ money and ‘emergency assistance’ went to terrorists.”

In just one example of many, according to a source quoted by the Washington Free Beacon, less than a week before Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, USAID handed $900,000 “to a terror charity in Gaza involved with the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.”

In the second reported case, USAID assisted a future senior Al Qaeda member due to improper vetting.

Fox News reported Monday on documents that have been found showing that the agency approved the request of one Anwar al-Aulaqi to fully fund his college studies in Colorado in 1990 without checking his bona fides.

He claimed that he had been born in Yemen and wanted to study civil engineering as an exchange student when in reality he was born in the United States and was thus ineligible for such aid.

He soon became an imam, preaching in several U.S. mosques, and serving as vice president of a charity that U.S. authorities said was a front to fund Al Qaeda.

While in San Diego he also reportedly became close with two of the 9/11 hijackers but was never charged in context with the movement’s attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon in 2001, although he was interrogated several times.

When his USAID fraud was discovered in 2002, he was tipped off that the authorities were investigating. He fled, reaching Yemen in 2004, where he officially joined Al Qaeda and rose higher and higher in its ranks.

His main role with the terrorists was as a senior recruiter, radicalizing many young, English-speaking Muslims, teaching them about jihad through popular motivational online videos and writings.

He also was in close contact with two men who eventually carried out terrorist attacks in 2009. One was Major Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 soldiers and injured more than 30 in a shooting in Fort Hood, Texas. The other was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day by detonating plastic explosives hidden in his underwear.

Al-Aulaqi was eventually killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011, ordered by then-president Barack Obama, who called it a “significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates.”

President Donald Trump is intent on closing down USAID, firing more than 90% of its staff, and putting its humanitarian functions within the purview of the State Department.