The United States is hitting two Egyptian nationals with sanctions for allegedly creating and maintaining a platform used to train members of the ISIS terrorist group in cybersecurity and to support its funding and recruitment.

The Treasury and State departments are accusing Mu’min Al-Mawji Mahmud Salim and Sarah Jamal Muhammad Al-Sayyid of launching and managing the Electronic Horizons Foundation (EHF), an ISIS-affiliated platform that trains ISIS leaders how to evade efforts by law enforcement to keep tabs on their online activity.

According to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Mu’min Al-Mawji provided ISIS leaders with technical support for applications and showed militant group supports how to use cryptocurrency in their operations. This included posting a tutorial on the EHF website that included instructions for donating money to ISIS-created operations.

In addition, he also created a media outlet linked to ISIS that created and distributed the group’s propaganda that included calls for violence against Western nations.

For her part, Sarah Jamal – described as Mu’min Al-Mawji’s partner – recruited ISIS members to join EHF and collected web servers to host EHF platforms. She also worked with Mu’min Al-Mawji with managing logistics and crypto operations.

A Money Man

In addition, Mu’min Al-Mawji, Sarah Jamal, and a third person based in Turkey, Faruk Guzel, are being designated by the Treasury Department for their work to assist, sponsor, and support – financially, materially, or technologically – ISIS.

The agency said that in mid-2020, Guzel, through a money remittance service, received financial transfers from a group of ISIS supporters and transferred those funds to people associated with ISIS in Syria.

The sanctions are meant to put a stranglehold on the financial support for EHF, its creators, and ISIS. Any property owned by any of the three in the United States must be reported to OFAC and U.S. citizens and organizations are banned from dealing with them.

“Today’s actions disrupt ISIS’s ability to move funds, including through the use of cryptocurrency, and leverage its online presence to recruit and promote its terrorist ideology,” said Brian Nelson, undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement.

The State Department said the sanctioning and designating of the three falls in line with the efforts of the Counter ISIS Finance Group (CIFG), a working group within the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS that includes more than 80 countries and international organizations and whose goal is to disrupt networks around the world that are financing ISIS.

The actions coincide with the 19^th meeting of CIFG.

The Rise of ISIS

ISIS’ beginning dates back to 2004, when an Islamic militant group merged with Al Qaeda, according to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCC). The group initially was focused on Iraq but expanded into eastern Syria in 2011 and changed its name to ISIS – Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – two years later. At one point in the last decade, the group held a third of Syria and 40% of Iraq but by then end of 2017 had lost 95% of its territory, according to the Wilson Center, which provides advice about global affairs to U.S. policymakers.

However, “despite losing many of its leaders and its territory, ISIS remains capable of conducting insurgent operations in Iraq and Syria while overseeing at least 19 branches and networks in Africa, Asia, and Europe,” the NCC wrote.

EHF was created in 2016 to provide tools to online ISIS members to prevent surveillance and enable secure browsing, according to a report by the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism. That included training ISIS supporters to use Tor, VPNs, and similar tools to remain anonymous and evade detection, to adopt encrypted platforms like Telegram and Element, and using cryptocurrency like Monero, though they were warned against using Bitcoin.

U.S. agencies have been pursuing EHF even before this week’s actions. The FBI is offering a reward of up to $20,000 for information about Mu’min Al-Mawji, with the notice saying authorities also want to interview Sarah Jamal.