Follow the money

ISIS, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and their 'Sovereign Wealth Funds'

The obvious horrors of Islamic State hardly need stating. Their genocidal attacks on the Kurdish, Yazidi and many fellow Arab Sunni people are well documented. The irony of British and other Western-born Muslims leaving Britain to brutalise the Iraqi and Syrian people with a well-armed and 'righteous' ideology should not be lost either.

The rapid spread of Islamic State could only have occurred with a high degree of funding and support from without. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have most often been named, with money for terrorism either coming from super-rich individuals or the governments themselves. We know that both countries channelled large funds into Islamist groups in Syria in the early stages of the war there and that the two Gulf states have spent billions of dollars on promoting the militant interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism as well as committing many human rights abuses in their own countries.