The Investigative Project Black Market Repatriation Of ISIS Families Fosters New Threats

By Abigail R. Esman

When Samir Azzuz was convicted of financing terrorism last month in the Netherlands, it was not the Dutch-Moroccan’s first terrorism rodeo: in 2006, as a member of the Dutch terror cell the Hofstadgroep, his detailed plans for terror attacks on the Dutch security agency AIVD and on various politicians landed him a 13-year sentence in a maximum security prison.

The Hofstadgroep is best known for a terror attack by another member, Mohammed Bouyeri, who in 2004 shot and stabbed controversial filmmaker and writer Theo van Gogh in broad daylight on a busy street in Amsterdam, killing him.

After his early release in September 2013, Azzuz wasted little time resuming jihadist activities – this time raising funds to help smuggle so-called ISIS brides and their children out of the detainee camps where they are currently being held in Syria. In all, Azzuz, who was arrested again in 2019 on charges of financing terrorism, is believed to have raised more than $107,000 from various sources. More than 15 ISIS brides have found their way back to the Netherlands. And though another Hofstadgroep member told Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad in 2020 that the cost to smuggle a woman out of the camps at that time was about $5000, it is not known how many of those Azzuz helped finance.

Azzuz is by no means the only one. Dozens of men and women in Germany, Austria, the UK, France, and elsewhere have been charged with terror financing for their work raising funds to “l...