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December 18th, 2015 
Awake Goy Finance ministers from the UN Security Council’s 15 members adopted a resolution Thursday aimed at disrupting the Islamic State group’s lucrative trade in oil and antiquities, along with revenue from ransom payments and other criminal activities.
The resolution builds on a Security Council action in February that banned trade in antiquities from Syria, threatened sanctions on anyone buying oil from the ISIS group and al Qaeda-linked al Nusra Front militants and urged states to stop kidnap ransom payments.
The council warned that some countries are failing to implement those sanctions against the group and offered guidance on implementation in a bid to push more countries to act.
“We already have a lot of these tools … we’re going to be bringing together a lot of strands, but what we most need now is states to do what they’re supposed to do,” a US official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The resolution “expresses concern about the lack of implementation” of previous resolutions targeting al Qaeda and the ISIS group, including an “insufficient level of reporting” by states on measures they have taken to implement United Nations sanctions.
The council renamed its al Qaeda sanctions regime the “ ISIS (Daesh) and al Qaeda Sanctions Committee” – ISIS is also known as ISIL and Daesh – and called on states to report within 120 days on their implementation of sanctions.
The ISIS group, which was blacklisted by the Security Council sanctions committee as an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq in May 2013, has seized swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria where it has proclaimed a caliphate.
Eyes on Turkey
The council also specifically asked states to report to on “interdictions in their territory of any oil, oil products, modular refineries, and related material being transferred to or from (the IS group or al Nusra Front)”.
ISIS militants have made more than $500 million trading oil with significant volumes sold to the Syrian government and some finding its way to Turkey, a senior US Treasury Department official said last week.
Russia has also accused Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan and his family of benefiting from the illegal smuggling of oil from Islamic State-held territory in Syria and Iraq. Erdogan has denied the accusations.
The resolution was not designed to target only Turkey, a Western diplomat told FRANCE 24.
“It’s not an anti-Turkish move. It creates extra obligations on Turkey and every other country to crack down on terrorist financing relating to [the ISIS] and creates an obligation for that country to also tell the UN with, some regularity, what it’s doing to crack down,” the diplomat said.
The US and Russian-drafted resolution – the result of a planned 18-month review of the al Qaeda sanctions regime – was adopted at the meeting of Security Council finance ministers chaired by US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. The United States is president of the council for December.
There are currently 243 individuals and 74 entities on the ISIS and al Qaeda sanctions list. They are subject to an arms embargo and a global asset freeze and travel ban.
The resolution makes clear that states are required to prevent their citizens from funding or providing services to “terrorist organisations or individual terrorists for any purpose, including but not limited to recruitment, training, or travel, even in the absence of a link to a specific terrorist act”.
United Nations experts have said about 22,000 foreign fighters from some 100 countries are linked to al Qaeda and the ISIS group in Syria and Iraq.
By France 24
Source Article from http://theiranproject.com/blog/2015/12/18/un-adopts-resolution-to-disrupt-isis-group-funding/
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