Al Qaeda Growing Rich Off Ransom Payments

Al-Qaeda affiliates in North Africa and the Middle East are increasingly funding themselves from ransom payments, which now average over $5 million when it comes to the going rate for the release of a Western hostage in the Sahara. And the problem of kidnapping is only going to worsen unless Western governments, businesses and non-profits observe a ban on paying up, say British officials.

In the past three years, jihadists groups linked to al-Qaeda and other radicals have raked in at least $70 million in ransom money—and with each year, the average financial demand from abductors has jumped, according to the British Foreign Office. A year ago, the average ransom paid in exchange for a Western hostage in the Sahara was $4 million—up from $2 million a couple of years before that.

Jihadist kidnapping is on the rise across North Africa, Yemen and Nigeria, British officials say, and has skyrocketed in the last year in Syria, where more than 30 journalists have been abducted as well as several civil-society and aid workers.

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“There has been a noticeable uptick in hostage-taking since the early 2000s,” says Jonathan Schanzer, a Mideast expert with the Washington DC-based think tank, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “And it is providing windfalls for the terrorists. There are a lot of smoke and mirrors involved with the denials by governments that they don’t pay.”

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