Should We Be Feeding Our Enemy In Iraq And Syria? ISIS Getting Food

The U.S. is aiding ISIS with taxpayer money

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Sam Rolley

Each year, the United States sends massive amounts of taxpayer dollars overseas in the form of humanitarian aid. And while much of the aid goes to worthy causes, it’s unsurprising that The Daily Beast reported Sunday that “truckloads of U.S. and Western aid has been flowing into territory controlled” by Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

The Daily Beast’s Jamie Dettner reported from Turkey:

The aid—mainly food and medical equipment—is meant for Syrians displaced from their hometowns, and for hungry civilians. It is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, European donors, and the United Nations. Whether it continues is now the subject of anguished debate among officials in Washington and European. The fear is that stopping aid would hurt innocent civilians and would be used for propaganda purposes by the militants, who would likely blame the West for added hardship.

The Bible says if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him something to drink—doing so will “heap burning coals” of shame on his head. But there is no evidence that the militants of the Islamic State, widely known as ISIS or ISIL, feel any sense of disgrace or indignity (and certainly not gratitude) receiving charity from their foes.

Quite the reverse, the aid convoys have to pay off ISIS emirs (leaders) for the convoys to enter the eastern Syrian extremist strongholds of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, providing yet another income stream for ISIS militants, who are funding themselves from oil smuggling, extortion, and the sale of whatever they can loot, including rare antiquities from museums and archaeological sites.

U.S. and Western aid finding its way into the hands of foes is nothing new.

For example, American taxpayers provide about $400 million per year in aid to the Palestinian Authority, which came under scrutiny this year when it entered into a unity agreement with the designated terror group Hamas.

The Congressional Research Service provides context for the U.S. aid relationship with the PA: “Since the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s, the U.S. government has committed approximately $5 billion in bilateral assistance to the Palestinians, who are among the largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid.”

According to reports over the summer, the PA has taken careful steps to structure its Hamas-backed government to avoid running afoul of U.S.regulations that strictly prohibit Hamas from benefitting from the aid.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a longtime proponent of cutting U.S. aid, drafted a bill that would prohibit the PA from receiving any U.S. assistance so long as it was in any way tangled with Hamas. The bill never made it to a full Senate vote, instead languishing in the Foreign Relations Committee.

In another example from 2012, U.S. officials were forced to cut military aid to Rwanda following reports from the United Nations that the U.S.taxpayer funding was being funneled to Congolese rebels guilty of gruesome human rights abuses.

Some watchers of the current aid abuses in the Middle East are calling on government officials to shut down aid to the region altogether. But critics argue that cutting aid will simply better ISIS’s ability to gain support from people reliant on the U.S. support.